France’s Constitutional Council ruled on 14 August 2026 that a law banning social media accounts for children under 15 violated constitutional protections for freedom of expression and communication, forcing President Emmanuel Macron’s government back to the drafting table on a signature child-safety measure it had pushed through parliament in July, according to the council’s own press release.
The law, as passed, would have required platforms to close existing accounts held by under-15s within four months and to verify the age of every user before granting access, using tools approved by France’s privacy regulator. The council’s official summary of the decision, published alongside the ruling, states that lawmakers were entitled to pursue the constitutional goal of protecting children’s best interests and preventing public-order harms, but that the blanket ban applied to every platform and every child under 15 regardless of the platform’s actual risk profile, the child’s age, maturity or family circumstances, and without any mechanism for parents to lift or narrow the restriction.
Court found privacy gap alongside speech problem
Beyond the free-expression finding, the council held that the law failed to specify the conditions under which age verification would occur, leaving a gap in the legal safeguards needed to protect the right to privacy, since any adult wishing to use a covered platform would also have had to prove their age with no defined limits on how that proof would be collected or handled. The Guardian reported that the council explicitly stated the contested provisions disproportionately infringed on freedom of expression and communication while also failing to provide legal safeguards for private life.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights group that has long opposed mandatory age-verification schemes, welcomed the ruling, arguing that the council correctly identified the core flaw: a blanket ban that treats all platforms and all children alike, backed by an identity-verification mandate with no defined boundaries, inevitably sweeps in far more speech and far more personal data than the stated child-protection goal requires.
Macron has asked his government to rework the legislation, according to reporting on the decision, though no new timeline beyond a statutory requirement to revisit the measure by early 2027 has been confirmed. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu, who took office amid a period of political turbulence in Paris, has not yet detailed how the government intends to redraft the ban to satisfy the court’s proportionality test.
Why a conservative-leaning court blocked a child-safety law
The ruling is notable because it did not come from digital-rights activists or from opposition lawmakers alone, but from France’s constitutional court applying a proportionality standard rooted in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man, a document conservatives in France have historically invoked to defend property and expression against state overreach. That the same reasoning blocked a child-protection law championed by Macron’s government raises a pointed question about why officials advanced a measure so broadly drafted that the country’s highest constitutional body found it could not survive scrutiny on its own terms.
How the outlets framed it
The Guardian’s coverage centred on the setback for Macron and framed the ruling primarily as a defeat for a child-safety initiative that the president now has to fix, emphasising what children lose in the meantime. The Electronic Frontier Foundation framed the same decision as a vindication of proportionality and privacy rights, arguing the court got it right by refusing to let a poorly targeted, all-or-nothing ban stand simply because its stated goal was popular. That split, between treating the outcome as a policy failure to patch and treating it as confirmation that the method itself was the problem, reveals a deeper disagreement over whether French officials misjudged the drafting or misjudged the entire approach.
Sources close to the deliberations have not been named in reporting, and the council’s own communiqué is the only document that lays out the full legal reasoning in French; English-language summaries from the Guardian and EFF each selectively emphasise different portions of that reasoning, which is part of why the framing gap matters here.
