Parliament set to decide on social media ban for under-15s

Paris – July 21, 2026: The French Parliament will make a final decision on Tuesday on a law banning access to social networks for children and young people under the age of 15. A joint committee made up of members of parliament and senators agreed on a common bill text on Monday. The Senate will vote first, followed by the National Assembly. Approval is expected, but the parliamentary process will only be complete after these votes in both chambers.

The compromise provides for a comprehensive ban rather than limiting it to a list of individual platforms deemed particularly dangerous by the regulator. Under this arrangement, people under 15 will no longer be able to open new accounts on covered social networks from September 1, 2026. According to parliamentary television channel LCP, existing user accounts are expected to be granted a four-month transition period. As a result, the practical transition will not be fully completed by the start of the new school year.

Age verification is central to implementation. Platforms must reliably verify that users have reached the required minimum age without themselves storing comprehensive identity verification data. Since April, the Ministry of Economy has been working with platform companies, technical service providers, and authorities to develop age-verification methods. The government considers such systems a prerequisite for the planned digital age limit of 15.

Simply entering a date of birth is considered insufficient. At the end of April, the European Commission provisionally found that, in the case of Facebook and Instagram, the measures used by Meta were not effectively preventing minors under 13 from accessing the services. Users could enter false dates of birth when creating accounts, and their accuracy was not sufficiently verified. This issue illustrates why France is seeking more robust technical solutions.

However, the initiative poses challenges from a data protection perspective. France’s data protection authority, CNIL, has long warned against systems that require identity document copies or biometric data to be sent directly to platforms. It supports independent authentication service providers that only confirm to platforms that a person meets the age requirement. Such a model is intended to prevent social services from simultaneously knowing both users’ identities and their usage behavior.

Paris was also forced to make adjustments in light of European law. On July 7, the European Commission raised concerns about parts of an earlier French bill, considering them incompatible with the Digital Services Act. In response, the Senate explained that its own approach of creating a list of networks subject to the ban had not been fundamentally rejected by Brussels. The current agreement instead adopts a general ban, leaving its legal certainty and implementation with data minimization to the decisive test.

Even if the law is finally passed on July 21, France will not automatically be technically prepared. The deadline until September 1 is short, and platforms must introduce systems that effectively address false declarations, comply with European requirements, and ensure the protection of personal data. The political decision on the age limit will then have been made, but its actual enforcement will begin afterward.