France's Constitutional Council voided the under-15 social media ban on breadth and on age checks

France's Constitutional Council did not rule on 14 August 2026 that children have a right to social media, and it did not strike down the whole of the law meant to protect minors from social media. It censured a single article of it, Article 1, and left the remainder standing. The decision, numbered 2026-911 DC, is formally recorded as a finding of partial non conformity.

Article 1 was the ban. It would have prohibited minors under 15 from using social media services. The law containing it was adopted by parliament on 21 July 2026 and, according to Euronews, was due to take effect on 1 September 2026, covering services including TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram. The referral did not come from the government. Two groups of deputies sent it to the Council, one led by Mathilde Panot on 23 July and one led by Boris Vallaud on 24 July.

The Council accepted the objective. Its press release records that protecting the best interests of the child, and preventing breaches of public order, can justify limiting minors' access to these services. It then held that this particular restriction failed anyway, and it gave two distinct reasons, either of which would have been enough.

The first reason was breadth. The Council grounded its analysis in Article 11 of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which protects freedom of expression and communication, and which it reads as including the freedom to access online communication services. Article 1 applied to every platform that lets users connect and share content, whatever its features, its actual content, the risks it carried or the protections it already offered. It required, in the Council's phrasing, no particular assessment of the risk to the minor, taking no account of age, maturity or family situation. It also left parents and legal guardians with no power to authorise access for their own child. On that basis the ban was, in the wording carried in the press release, not adapted, necessary and proportionate to the aim pursued. MLex, reporting the decision on 14 August, quoted the judges as also finding that the risks to minors' health and safety have not been established.

The second reason was the machinery, not the rule. A ban keyed to age necessarily requires everyone, adults included, to prove how old they are. The Council held that the legislator had not specified the conditions under which users would have to prove their age, and had therefore failed to provide the legal guarantees needed to protect the right to respect for private life. This is the part with the widest reach, because it is not about children at all. It is a holding that an age gate written without privacy machinery attached is defective on its own terms.

Having censured Article 1, the Council declined to rule on the other complaints raised against it, including arguments about legislative competence and the clarity of the law, on the ground that the censure disposed of the matter. That leaves those questions open for any successor text.

The same Council, on the same day, went the other way on a more contested subject. In decision 2026-910 DC it found the law on the right to assistance in dying constitutional, subject to reservations covering pharmacists' conscience protections, the circumstances in which private establishments may refuse, and the treatment of observations by guardians of protected persons. The Elysee, quoted by Euronews, called that outcome the completion of an exemplary democratic debate.

On the social media ban the presidency said Emmanuel Macron remains committed to the policy and has asked Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu to produce a legally robust replacement. Nothing in the decision prevents that. What the decision does is narrow the field: a redraft that distinguishes between services by risk, that leaves room for parental authorisation and individual assessment, and that writes the age verification rules into the statute rather than leaving them to be filled in later, would meet the two objections the Council actually made.

The decision arrives while the same argument is running elsewhere. MLex reported that the European Commission intends to bring forward its own legislation on the question, with Commission President Ursula von der Leyen indicating a proposal after the 2026 summer.

Several things are not yet known. No replacement text has been published, and no date has been set for one. The Council did not say what a proportionate scheme would look like, only what this one lacked, so whether a risk graduated ban can be drawn at all is untested. And because the Council stopped once it had censured Article 1, the competence and clarity objections raised by the deputies have never been ruled on.