France’s constitutional council didn’t strike down the country’s proposed social media ban for children under 15 because it was too aggressive. It struck it down because it wasn’t specific enough about how age verification would actually work. That distinction matters a lot, and it’s the part most headlines are glossing over.
As reported by Engadget, the court’s core objection was that banning minors from certain platforms would, by design, force every single user, adults included, to prove their age before getting access. The law passed last month and would have made France the first European country with this kind of ban. But the court found that the legislature never actually spelled out how that proof would be collected, stored, or limited. No legal safeguards. No defined conditions. Just a mandate with a gaping hole where the implementation should have been.
That’s a serious privacy problem dressed up as a child safety measure. Age verification systems don’t exist in a vacuum. They require identity data, and identity data gets collected, retained, and sometimes breached. Asking every French internet user to hand over proof of age to access platforms like TikTok or Instagram, without clear rules about what happens to that data, is exactly the kind of policy that sounds protective on paper and creates new risks in practice.
President Macron isn’t walking away from the fight. He’s ordered Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu to rewrite the bill with the court’s concerns in mind. So this ban will be back, just in a revised form. Macron has been vocal about his support for restricting minors’ access to social media, and politically, it’s an easy position to hold. Nobody campaigns on letting kids doomscroll.
But France is also not operating in isolation here. Australia already bans children under 16 from platforms including Facebook, TikTok, Twitch, and YouTube, and that law is facing legal challenges from social media companies. Early evidence from Australia also suggests kids are finding ways around the restrictions anyway. Denmark is close to passing similar legislation. The UK is considering its own version. Canada has introduced a bill targeting users 16 and under. Several American states have pushed related measures, though most stop short of outright bans and lean on parental consent instead.
The bigger pattern here is that governments around the world are converging on the same instinct, that platforms should be gated by age, but none of them have cleanly solved the verification problem. And that problem is not a technical footnote. It’s the whole ballgame. Any system that can confirm a user is over 15 can also build a detailed profile of who that user is. The question regulators keep skipping is: what happens to that information once the check is done?
France’s court asked that question. Legislators didn’t have an answer. That should be the headline.