Parliament decides on banning social media for those under 15

Paris – 21 July 2026: The French Parliament is set to make a final decision on Tuesday on a law intended to ban children and teenagers under the age of 15 from accessing social media. A joint committee of deputies and senators agreed on a common text on Monday. The Senate will vote first, followed by the National Assembly. Approval is expected, but only these two votes will complete the parliamentary procedure.

The compromise provides for a comprehensive ban rather than merely a list of individual particularly risky platforms maintained by the regulatory authority. From 1 September 2026, persons under the age of 15 will, under this provision, be unable to open new accounts on the relevant social networks. For existing user accounts, according to the parliamentary television channel LCP, a transition period of four months is planned. Therefore, the practical transition will not be fully completed by the start of the school year.

Age verification is at the center of implementation. Platforms will have to reliably determine whether a user has reached the required minimum age without independently storing the full scope of identification data. Since April, the Ministry of Economy has been working with platform companies, technical service providers and authorities on procedures for determining age. The government considers such systems a necessary prerequisite for the planned digital age threshold of 15.

Simply entering a date of birth should not be sufficient for this. At the end of April, the European Commission preliminarily found with regard to Facebook and Instagram that the measures used by Meta do not effectively prevent access by minors under the age of 13. When creating an account, users could provide a false date of birth without sufficient verification of its accuracy. This problem explains why France is demanding a more reliable technical solution.

However, the plan is complex from a data protection perspective. The French data protection authority CNIL has long warned against procedures in which copies of identity documents or biometric data are transmitted directly to platforms. It supports independent verification service providers that only confirm to the platform that a person has reached the age threshold. Such a model is intended to prevent a social service from simultaneously having information about a person’s identity and their behavior while using it.

Paris also had to revise the draft in light of European law. On 7 July, the European Commission criticized parts of the previous French draft as incompatible with the European Digital Services Act. The Senate subsequently stated that its approach involving a list of banned networks had not been fundamentally rejected by Brussels. The current agreement instead relies on a general ban and shifts the decisive test to its legally robust and data-efficient implementation.

If the law is finally adopted on 21 July, this will not mean that France will automatically be technically ready. The deadline of 1 September is tight, and platforms must introduce procedures that are effective against false information, comply with European requirements and guarantee the protection of personal data. The political decision on the age threshold will thus be made; its practical enforcement will only begin afterward.