France Becomes the First EU Country to Ban Social Media for Children Under 15

France on Tuesday became the first country in the European Union to ban children under 15 from using social media, approving a sweeping law that supporters call a landmark for child online safety and that critics warn may prove nearly impossible to enforce.

The measure, backed overwhelmingly in the French parliament, bars minors under 15 from accessing a social media platform when it "is likely to harm their physical, mental or moral development." It is expected to apply to all the major services, including TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram, and will be overseen by Arcom, France's audiovisual and digital communications regulator.

The rules will roll out in stages. Beginning in September, platforms will be required to block users under 15 from creating new accounts and to introduce age-verification checks for new sign-ups. From January 2027, the requirement expands to existing accounts, meaning every user in France will eventually have to prove they are at least 15. The law also bars students from bringing phones into high schools starting next year.

France follows Australia, which at the end of 2025 became the first country in the world to impose such a restriction when it banned under-16s from social media. The French vote makes the country the second globally and the first within the 27-nation bloc to adopt a blanket age limit, a move President Emmanuel Macron has made a defining cause of the final stretch of his presidency. With his term winding down, the ban is likely to stand as one of the last major domestic reforms he ushers through.

The decision is already reverberating across Europe. A long list of governments — including Greece, Germany, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Austria, Slovenia, Ireland and the Netherlands — has expressed interest in similar rules, and analysts say Paris may have kicked off a continent-wide wave of age restrictions. Bloomberg described the French law as the opening move in a cascade of new European regulation.

Not everyone is convinced it will work. Critics argue the biggest challenge will be enforcement, and many question whether current age-verification technology is robust enough to keep determined teenagers off the platforms. Some minors, they note, may bypass the restrictions with VPNs, fake birth dates or accounts created by older friends and relatives. Privacy advocates have also warned that verifying every user's age could force platforms to collect even more sensitive personal data. For now, though, France has planted a flag, betting that the risks of unregulated social media to children outweigh the difficulty of policing it.