Several European nations—France, Austria, Greece, and Spain—are pursuing legislation to restrict minors' access to social media platforms. On August 14, France's highest constitutional authority delivered a significant ruling that underscores the necessity of grounding such policies in fundamental rights protections rather than sweeping prohibitions.

The French Parliament had adopted the measure on July 21, intending to shield young people from documented harms including anxiety, depression, sleep disturbances, and online harassment. Implementation was scheduled for the start of the 2026-27 school year. However, the Constitutional Council invalidated Article 1 of the bill, finding it incompatible with the French Constitution. The Council did not dispute the goal of safeguarding children; instead, it determined that a universal prohibition lacked proportionality because it ignored variations between different platforms and the circumstances of individual minors.

The ruling also identified insufficient legal protections surrounding age verification mechanisms, which would have obliged both adults and children to confirm their age before accessing covered services. President Emmanuel Macron has instructed Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu to develop a replacement proposal, with the government targeting completion by spring 2027.

Overly broad service definitions undermine expression rights

A primary basis for the Council's rejection was the law's failure to differentiate among services according to their characteristics, technical capabilities, potential dangers, and necessary protections. The ban, as structured through references to the EU's Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act via Article 6 of the French law of 21 June 2004, captured access to any online platform permitting users to connect, exchange material, and discover other participants and content, without regard to the specific functionalities, hazards, or existing safeguards involved.

The legislation did carve out certain categories: online encyclopedias, educational or scientific directories, and platforms dedicated to developing and distributing free or open-source software for educational ends. Yet the Council deemed these carve-outs insufficient in scope.

While acknowledging that protecting children's welfare could justify limiting their access to social media, the Council concluded the blanket approach was neither essential nor appropriately calibrated to the stated aim. It found the measure excessively curtailed minors' and children's entitlement to express themselves and communicate—a right anchored in Article 11 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, even when frequently disregarded in policy discussions.

The Council's reasoning aligned with concerns raised by CDT Europe, Tech Legality, and numerous civil society groups: sweeping bans disproportionately strip young people of their capacity to obtain information and engage in democratic life. Children function as participants in civic affairs and require involvement in their countries' democratic institutions. Excluding those below voting age from a spectrum of social media outlets—and thereby from online conversations about elections—squanders a critical window to prepare future voters to meaningfully participate in democratic discourse, which predominantly unfolds on these platforms.

By treating all social networking services under the French definition (which adopts the Digital Markets Act's Article 2(7) characterization) as a unified hazard, the legislation cast an excessively wide net, sweeping up beneficial digital tools and overlooking that platforms serve vital functions for learning, civic participation, and social connection. Multiple amicus briefs submitted alongside the Council's judgment underscored that Article 1 indiscriminately prevented access to educational, artistic, and civic material, as well as constrained the expression and communication capacities of 13- to 15-year-olds—capacities essential to contemporary social participation.

Age verification safeguards absent from legislation

The Constitutional Council determined that the law's omission of protective measures for age verification mechanisms fell short of constitutional privacy standards applicable to all inhabitants, whether adult or child.

[By] prohibiting any minor under the age of fifteen from accessing certain online services, the contested provisions themselves imply that every person, even an adult, must prove his or her age before accessing them. In the absence of a determination of the conditions and limits within which this must thus be justified, the legislature has not provided the legal safeguards of such a nature as to ensure compliance with these constitutional requirements.

French Constitutional Council

Given the extensive and serious privacy dangers posed by large-scale age verification, it appears striking that lawmakers did not deem it necessary to establish explicit protections. According to the French government's August 5, 2026 submission to the Council, this gap may have been deliberate. Officials contended that the Digital Services Act, particularly the Article 28 DSA Guidelines, comprehensively addresses age verification, and that French legislators therefore lack the authority to establish (further) safeguards and conditions for age verification rollout.

The Council declined to address this reasoning, instead plainly declaring that the missing protections in domestic legislation violated constitutional norms. This stance may reflect the fact that the safeguards and conditions cited by the government appear in the Article 28 DSA Guidelines—which carry no binding force—rather than in the DSA statute itself. The Guidelines specify which age verification approaches suit particular protective objectives and how to evaluate age verification for precision, dependability, resilience, non-intrusiveness, and fairness. Since these parameters exist only in the Guidelines and not in the foundational legislative text, one could argue the EU has not definitively 'regulated' age verification.

France's legislature could have incorporated the choice to deploy age verification and the associated protections outlined in the Guidelines into its own statutory framework without overstepping EU authority—rather, this would represent a translation of non-binding EU guidance into national law. When declaring the statute unconstitutional, the Council focused narrowly on the absence of safeguards in French law. This does not, however, guarantee that adding safeguards would cure the constitutional defect. Contingent on its breadth and methodology, widespread age verification could still pose grave hazards to privacy, equity, expression, and information access.

Since the Council offered no specification of what safeguards would satisfy constitutional privacy requirements, the legislature must reassess its strategy and devise such protections for the law's next version.

Parental authority absent, compounding rights violations

The Council held that excluding parental authority as a means to override or modify the ban contradicts the right to express oneself. The Council reasoned that removing parental involvement in a child's social media engagement results in a failure to weigh the particular hazard facing a minor, "taking into account in particular his or her age, degree of maturity and family situation, as well as the nature of the service concerned." Bon Sens, in an amicus submission, advanced a parallel argument: an absolute prohibition establishes a blanket presumption of "educational incapacity" across all French households.

ONEST's amicus brief reinforced this perspective, asserting that "[i]t is for the parents, not the State, to assess, child by child and service by service, what the age and maturity of the one permit with regard to the other."

The Council thus appears to signal to lawmakers that the next iteration must incorporate an individualized risk assessment mechanism, potentially through parental authority, to avoid rendering an 'absolute' ban unconstitutional. The judgment carries some ambiguity here, criticizing both the absence of parental participation in governing children's platform use and, more broadly, the lack of any tailored evaluation of the hazard to the specific minor, which it views as a disproportionate curtailment of expression rights.

The Council underscored that legal guardians ought to be empowered to "decide to lift the ban, to limit its scope or to authorize access to certain services" in the child's interest. If interpreted as a call for a parental decision-making framework, this could theoretically permit social media engagement for those under 15 where they demonstrate sufficient development and resilience to navigate potential dangers.

Yet establishing such a mechanism hinges on creating some form of verifiable parental consent (VPC)—encompassing a way to confirm the user is a minor and to securely connect their identity to their legal guardian, depending on the required level of assurance. This introduces numerous operational and legal complications.

Drawing on experience with child data protection under the General Data Protection Regulation, platforms struggle to deliver a VPC system that reliably confirms the consenting party is genuinely the child's parent or legal guardian. VPC also raises substantial questions regarding trustworthiness and fairness. Recognized techniques—government ID verification, facial recognition comparison, knowledge-based verification, and payment card checks—each face circumvention by minors, impose significant privacy exposure for parents, and create sufficient friction that numerous households abandon the process.

No mechanism exists for situations where separated parents hold conflicting views on their child's digital service participation. Standard VPC approaches overlook millions of guardians who are unbanked, lack legal status, or come from non-standard family structures. The load falls disproportionately on the most marginalized children—those in state care, or with uninvolved or absent parents—precisely those the policy ostensibly aims to serve most.

This demonstrates that parental consent, as an alternative to a universal ban, appears less restrictive in principle yet raises substantial doubts about workability, dependability, and fairness.

Implications for EU child safety frameworks

As EU member states continue advancing child and minor protection proposals, the Constitutional Council's judgment has reverberated across the continent, anticipated to shape discussions in Brussels ahead of the expected EU-wide child online safety position due in December 2026. The ruling exposes a previously overlooked regulatory weakness: while politically attractive, penalizing children through bans proves myopic regarding fundamental rights consequences and will encounter substantial legal and operational obstacles.

Age verification represents a cornerstone of the EU's child online safety strategy, extending beyond any general prohibition. As service providers implement age verification, they should undertake a Fundamental Rights Impact Assessment (FRIA), inclusive of a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA), before rolling out any age verification tool. It remains vital that determinations about whether to deploy age verification and selections of deployment methods stay anchored in fundamental rights considerations.

Bans concentrating on users rather than the platforms themselves forfeit significant opportunities to tackle underlying drivers of many concerns surrounding minors' platform engagement. These might encompass systematically recognizing and addressing hazards created by design choices embedded in services and developing mitigation strategies. Pressing platforms to abandon addictive design patterns through the DSA and Article 28 guidelines could accomplish the intended objective of automatically safeguarding minors and children alongside all users, without necessitating intrusive, government-imposed digital exclusion.

Platforms now confront mounting litigation worldwide seeking accountability for product design decisions, with emerging court determinations against platforms in the United States. Regardless of whether these rulings survive appeal or prove effective, regulatory instruments like the Article 28 Guidelines under the Digital Services Act may genuinely reshape company incentives to detect and address design-related dangers beyond merely targeting their financial interests. Yet shifting corporate behavior represents only one dimension. Guaranteeing that current and forthcoming regulatory frameworks achieve equilibrium and withstand judicial examination constitutes the other.

Political and policy considerations ahead

With the 2027 French presidential campaign gathering momentum, the Constitutional Council's judgment creates a high-profile political flashpoint that candidates across the spectrum will probably seize upon, potentially depicting the rejection either as judicial overreach or as governmental incompetence in enacting workable statutes.

President Macron's insistence on a revision before spring 2027 transforms the Bill into a defining test of the boundary between state-directed digital safeguarding and constitutional individual freedoms. Gabriel Attal, a prominent French political figure, has already demanded a national referendum, leveraging the Constitutional Council's decision to portray mainstream politics as disconnected from ordinary parental concerns and constrained by privileged judicial authority.

Looking toward Brussels, the Constitutional Council's judgment should prompt essential reconsideration of whether the European Commission's anticipated EU-wide framework aligns with safeguarding the fundamental human rights of minors, children, and all users.

The Constitutional Council's message is unmistakable: Safeguarding minors and children online cannot proceed by eroding their entitlements to expression, information access, privacy, and data safeguarding. In light of this, EU decision-makers must shift away from restrictive access controls toward mandating platform safety embedded in design and operation from inception.

Source: Tech Policy Press