France's Parliament voted to bar children under 15 from social media and ban phones in high schools, a move that makes the country the first in the European Union to impose a blanket restriction on minors' access to platforms like TikTok.

Both chambers of the French Parliament approved the measure on Tuesday, July 15, capping months of debate and last-minute negotiations with the European Commission over whether the bill stepped on existing EU regulations. The legislation, which President Emmanuel Macron has called a flagship initiative of his second term, also prohibits mobile phone use in high schools and is targeted to take effect when the new school year begins in September. AP News reported that France joins a growing list of countries restricting children's access to social media, following Australia's world-first ban on platforms for users under 16 enacted last December.

The law exempts online encyclopedias, educational sites, and scientific directories. But for mainstream social media platforms, the ones that hold a teenager's attention for hours at a stretch, the door is now shut for anyone under 15, at least on paper.

Macron frames the fight as protecting children's minds from Big Tech

Macron wasted no time claiming the moment. The Washington Times reported his reaction to the vote:

"France is leading the way in Europe in protecting our children and our teenagers. We will keep on going."

In earlier remarks pushing for an accelerated legislative timeline, Macron put the argument in starker terms. Fox News reported him saying:

"The brains of our children and our teenagers are not for sale. The emotions of our children and our teenagers are not for sale or to be manipulated."

That language, blunt, parental, and aimed squarely at Silicon Valley and its foreign competitors, resonated with advocates who have spent years arguing that tech companies profit from addicting minors. Whether it resonates with enforcement agencies tasked with actually keeping 14-year-olds off Instagram is another question entirely.

While American lawmakers have debated children's online safety for years with little to show for it, France moved from proposal to law in a single presidential term. The contrast is worth noting for U.S. conservatives who have watched polling show broad public support for protecting kids online, only to see Congress stall repeatedly.

A mother's account of TikTok, self-harm, and a year and a half in the hospital

Behind the parliamentary vote are families who say social media nearly destroyed their children. Gaëlle Berbonde, a 52-year-old mother from the Paris region, told the Associated Press that her daughter got her first smartphone in seventh grade. What followed was a descent into self-harm, cutting, along with anorexia and depression, which Berbonde linked directly to her daughter's use of TikTok. The girl spent a year and a half in the hospital. She is now 16 and doing well.

Berbonde, who campaigned for the bill, told reporters:

"We've been campaigning for this bill from the start because, frankly, we have no other option, no other way to counter tech giants. The only thing we can do is protect our children, just as we protect our children from drinking alcohol."

Her family is not alone. Several French families have filed lawsuits against TikTok over teen suicides they say were linked to harmful content on the platform. The current status of those cases remains unclear.

A report from France's national health watchdog painted a grim statistical picture of how deeply smartphones have embedded themselves in French adolescence. Roughly 90 percent of children between 12 and 17 use smartphones daily to access the internet. Of those, 58 percent use their devices for social networks. Half of all French teenagers spend between two and five hours a day on a smartphone. The report tied that usage to reduced self-esteem and increased exposure to content associated with self-harm, drug use, and suicide.

Those numbers are not unique to France. American parents recognize the pattern, the phone handed over in middle school, the hours lost to scrolling, the behavioral changes that follow. The difference is that France decided to act legislatively rather than leave it to parents to fight the algorithm alone. In the United States, where conservative voices have pushed back against unchecked corporate power in other arenas, the appetite for similar action exists but has not yet produced a comparable law.

Left-wing opposition and the enforcement problem no one has solved

The bill did not pass without objection. Lawmakers from France Unbowed, a left-wing party, voted against the measure. Their arguments were procedural and practical: they said the bill's constitutionality is unclear, that it would effectively end online anonymity in France, and that enforcement would prove impossible.

On enforcement, even the bill's supporters concede the road ahead is complicated. Ines Legendre, a legal advisor for e-Enfance, an online child-protection group, laid out the unresolved questions:

"We'll also have to address the issue of existing accounts for those under 15. How do we identify them? How do we suspend them? And then there's the question of age verification for all new accounts that will come into effect."

Those are not minor details. Age verification on the internet remains an unsolved technical and privacy challenge worldwide. Platforms have resisted robust verification systems for years, and any mechanism strong enough to reliably confirm a user's age raises its own civil-liberties concerns, a tension the France Unbowed lawmakers flagged.

The bill also had to clear a late hurdle with Brussels. On Monday, July 14, the day before the final vote, French lawmakers held emergency negotiations after the European Commission found that the latest version of the bill overlapped with the EU's Digital Services Act, which already sets rules aimed at keeping internet users safe. An amended version was drafted and submitted to both chambers for the Tuesday vote. The specific provisions that resolved the Commission's concerns have not been made public.

A constitutional review is also expected before the law can take effect. That review could delay implementation past Macron's September target. And with Macron set to leave office next year, the law's long-term enforcement will fall to his successor, whoever that may be. Whether the next president shares Macron's commitment to the measure is an open question.

Australia led the way; France followed, and America watches

France is not operating in a vacuum. Australia enacted the world's first ban on social media for children under 16 in December, restricting access to platforms including Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube. The New York Post noted that France's move signals growing legislative momentum globally, a trend that puts increasing pressure on American lawmakers to act.

In the United States, the debate over children and social media has produced hearings, proposals, and bipartisan hand-wringing but no federal law remotely as sweeping as what France just passed. Individual states have moved on age-verification requirements and parental-consent rules, but a national standard remains elusive. The tech lobby remains powerful, and the First Amendment raises legal questions that do not exist under French or Australian law.

Still, the political will is there on the American right. Conservative parents and lawmakers have argued for years that Big Tech exploits children for engagement metrics and ad revenue, and that the platforms' own internal research, much of it leaked by whistleblowers, confirms the harm. France's law gives those arguments a real-world proof of concept, or at least a real-world experiment. Whether it works will depend entirely on whether enforcement mechanisms can match the ambition of the legislation.

The broader question for American policymakers is whether they are willing to move as decisively as France did, or whether they will continue to hold hearings, express concern, and leave parents to manage the problem on their own. In an era when major policy agreements can move from negotiation to signing in a matter of days, the years-long stall on children's online safety stands out.

France passed a law. It may be imperfect, and enforcement may prove messy. But at least one Western democracy decided that protecting children from algorithms mattered more than protecting the platforms that run them. The United States has yet to make that choice.