France is banning social media for under-15s — the first EU country to do it
France's parliament approved a ban on social media for under-15s and a phone ban in schools. The law still needs the Constitutional Council's sign-off.
France took a step this week that no other European Union country had taken: both chambers of parliament approved a law banning under-15s from social media. It’s a flagship of Emmanuel Macron’s second term, and it puts the country at the front of a debate raging worldwide — the effect of social platforms on the health and safety of the young.
The law doesn’t stop there. It also bans mobile phones inside schools and brings new advertising rules for platforms. To work, lawmakers concede, age-verification tools will be needed, though it’s not yet clear how that will be done in practice without putting everyone’s privacy on the line.
What does the new French law say?
In essence, no social media accounts below 15, and phones stay outside the classroom. Before it takes effect, the text still needs the go-ahead from the Constitutional Council, the court that checks whether laws respect France’s constitution. Only then will the exact start date and enforcement details be known. Official documents are being published on the National Assembly site.
And in Portugal — does anything change?
Directly, no — this is a French law. But what France does rarely stays in France: when a big EU country moves, the debate spreads to its neighbours, and Brussels tends to treat these cases as a test. Portugal is already having the same conversation in schools and around the dinner table, and European pressure to regulate the platforms has been building, as seen with the AI Act’s rules coming into force. If the French experiment goes well, more countries will likely want to copy it.
Image: ZeusUpsistos / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
