Why France's under-15 social media ban collapsed (and why Portugal's version is built differently)
France's Constitutional Council struck the ban down on 14 August. It accepted that minors' access can be limited — what it rejected was a blanket ban and an age check with no rules attached.
The ban was supposed to start when French schools went back in September. It won’t. On 14 August the Constitutional Council struck down article 1 of the law barring under-15s from social media, and the headline that travelled the world — France can’t ban it — is close to the opposite of what the court actually wrote.
The nine members said, near the top of the ruling, that protecting the best interests of the child and preventing threats to public order are constitutional grounds solid enough to justify limiting minors’ access to these services. The age limit itself, in other words, is allowed. What failed was the drafting.
The two grounds, and they are not the same thing
The first is reach. The ban covered anything that counted as a social network, with no distinction between features, content or the actual danger any given service poses, and with no assessment of the individual child — age, maturity, family situation. It did not even set out how a parent could lift the ban in their own child’s interest. A general prohibition of that shape, the Council held, is not suited, necessary or proportionate to the aim.
The second is quieter and matters more. By barring under-15s, the law meant that by design every user had to prove their age at the door, adults included. And then it did not say how. Having failed to fix the conditions and limits of that proof, the French legislature never created the legal guarantees that protect private life, which is where the law runs into article 2 of the 1789 Declaration.
This was not a court inventing an obstacle. It was a court pointing out that age-checking an entire country is a personal-data operation, and that an operation like that has to be written into the statute.
Portugal wrote both of those parts differently
The bill from the PSD, approved in principle in February and now in committee, is not a blanket ban. It raises the digital age of autonomous access from 13 to 16, keeps the bar on account creation below 13, and opens a middle band between 13 and 16 that runs on express, verified parental consent. That middle band is precisely the release valve the French law was faulted for lacking.
On verification, the Portuguese text also refuses to leave the blank. It requires a mechanism compatible with the Chave Móvel Digital — Portugal’s state digital identity key — or another sound equivalent that identifies the minor and reveals only their age, and it explicitly bans self-declared ages. Naming the mechanism does not settle everything, but it is more than the French law managed.
One gap survives, and nobody is talking about it. The Council also faulted the French law for catching services whose risk to minors has not been established, treating them all alike. Any regime that handles a short-video feed and a messaging app with the same rule carries that problem into the room with it.
That is a committee-stage question, and committee is where the bill sits. It passed with the PSD, PS, PAN and JPP in favour, IL and Chega against, and abstentions from CDS-PP, PCP, Livre, BE and one Socialist MP. Portugal has been moving on adjacent ground for a while, having already extended its school phone ban up to year 9.
What happens next in France
The government has been asked to rewrite the text, with a legally robust version in force by spring 2027 that takes account of both the ruling and the European framework. That framework is moving too: the European Commission is preparing proposals on minors and addictive platform design, after the European Parliament backed a report last November arguing for a minimum age of 16.
Worth marking the date. France was the first EU country to pass a ban like this and it is now the first to find out where such a ban breaks. Everyone drafting one after it, Portugal included, has a map that did not exist in July.
By Oliver Grant
Image: Faqscl / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
