France’s Constitutional Council has declared that legislation limiting social media to kids under 15 constitutes “a disproportionate infringement of freedom of expression and communication and, on the other hand, have not provided the legal safeguards necessary to ensure the right to respect for private life.” In short, this throws a wrench into France’s plan to address the risk social media presents to young people – and represents Europe’s first significant legal roadblock in implementing age assurance laws, with implications for legislative efforts elsewhere. The decision rests on the notion that the law as drafted limits young people’s right to freedom of expression, echoing arguments that Big Tech has mustered to quash platform-level age assurance laws in the U.S., where the First Amendment puts broad protections on free speech.
This injects a note of irony in the finding. As noted in commentary from Health Policy Watch, third-party age check laws have largely been designed to avoid clashes with the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA): “lawmakers had stripped all direct sanctions against tech platforms from the Bill. To bypass Brussels, the final text targeted minors directly with a blanket usage ban rather than holding the companies accountable.”
In striking down the current age assurance legislation – which was set to take effect in September, making France the first EU nation to put new legal age restrictions on social platforms – the Council may have given Meta, Google and the other massive U.S. companies fighting against online safety laws the ammunition they need to avoid age checks in Europe.
The Constitutional Council’s legal reasoning sets a precedent, and because EU nations share similar foundational rights regarding freedom of expression and data privacy, their domestic courts could use the French ruling to strike down age check laws before they even launch.
Alternative to age assurance is harder line on content
However, that will not quiet calls from parents to do something about the social media problem. Indeed, if age assurance tech at the platform level is deemed to be in violation of EU law, that politically popular legislative energy will have to go somewhere else.
In Australia, which was the first country in the world to raise the minimum age for social media users, the government has been looking at the data, taking criticism of the current law into account – and plotted course for a digital duty of care, a legal framework designed to hold online platforms accountable for harms occurring on their services.
If Europe decides that age checks are too much of a burden on users’ rights, the logical next step is to refocus on the platforms themselves, by holding them accountable for what happens within their virtual walls.
The opposition to President Emmanuel Macron’s government has already indicated a move in that direction.
Arthur Delaporte, a deputy for the center-left Socialist Party, insists that “what is needed is not to say ‘we’re banning TikTok’, but rather ‘we’re banning what is dangerous on the apps’; therefore, apps containing dangerous elements must be banned if they do not reform.”
Problem becoming clear in increments
In broad strokes, this is how the age assurance debate has played out: as social media has gotten more predatory (or been exposed as such), parents have pressured lawmakers for help in navigating the risks.
Governments have responded by developing laws that restrict selected social media platforms to users over a specified age threshold (15 in France, 16 in Australia).
Biometrics and digital identity providers have stepped up to offer technology that has been proven to be effective in delivering highly effective, privacy preserving age assurance.
Opponents to age laws have criticized age laws for disproportionately imposing on the rights of adult users (because to determine if a user is old enough or not, every user has to do an age check) and for taking away an important vehicle for connection for youth, especially those from marginalized groups.
As the argument has progressed, both sides have increasingly turned in the direction of a broad legal framework that eliminates risks for young users – by mandating that platforms eliminate the risks altogether, or face legal consequences.
Question 1: why do we need social media?
Europe – and the world – now face two critical questions in determining how to proceed.
The first is whether or not social media’s value can be quantified. Much effort has been put into investigating the potential harms social media can expose kids to, and there is still no scientific consensus on the extent of those harms. Conversely, the benefits they offer to the world have, from the beginning, been based largely on assumptions, which are themselves based on assertions from social media CEOs that their products connect people.
Big Tech loves the idea that Instagram is as important to kids’ development as the library. It has long promoted itself as the new public square. In this, it illustrates one of the core strategies to come from the innovators of Silicon Valley: flood the market with a product so thoroughly that it becomes easy to insist it would be impossible to live without. The same tactic is now playing out in the marketing of large language models and generative AI: we are routinely told that there is no question AI will transform the world, only how.
But the truth is that no law is aiming to stop kids from speaking their mind, or accessing material online. Rather, they are aiming to prevent kids from doing so within algorithmic environments that have been designed to addict them, and have proven to present real-world risks such as grooming and cyber bullying.
In striking down France’s law, the Council said it “failed to distinguish between hazardous social networks and harmless digital tools,” and that it would “have equally targeted collaborative educational and leisure apps.” But this is fixable with revised legal language that more clearly lays out which sites are affected; in Australia, for example, the social media law covers ten major platforms (although others are under consideration). The point is that overly broad language does not reflect an error in intent, but execution.
If some platforms are harmless or beneficial digital tools, others are undoubtedly “hazardous social networks.” Whether or not their benefits balance their hazards is the key question. Youth have certainly connected on social media, but highlighting how platforms help marginalized youth ignores the role the same platforms have played in creating a toxic environment, online and beyond. For every Idle No More, there is an Andrew Tate.
Moreover, there is a precedent for regulating social lubricants that come at a cost to public health. Tobacco companies hooked their early ad campaigns on the idea that smoking could calm a person down and make social connection smoother. The value of a cocktail as a social tool is increasingly under interrogation, as the health risks of alcohol consumption become clearer. We have already put age restrictions on these items, because we have decided that, for kids, the harms outweigh the benefits.
Marshall McLuhan famously declared that “the medium is the message.” Policymakers would be wise to consider that aphorism in the context of social media – and ask, ultimately, what message it is sending.
Question 2: what does an effective penalty for noncompliance look like?
The second major question facing legislators is more practical in nature: how can social media firms be brought to heel?
The threat of massive fines has proven to be easy for companies like Meta to shrug off. Their wealth and political influence have put them beyond the plane most private firms occupy; they are everywhere, and losses that would destroy other companies barely make a dent in their bottom line. Their legal apparatus has effectively limitless funds with which to pursue litigation. The company has already pushed back on fines issues in the UK, and, while it faces a cascade of lawsuits in the U.S., it will do everything it can to avoid accountability.
This October will see the release of a companion film to The Social Network, the 2010 film that told the story of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s rise to power. The trailer for The Social Reckoning features a clip in which a Meta executive tells a journalist played by The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White, “we’re twice as big as the biggest country on Earth. We’re post-government around here.”
While it is a fictionalization, it would seem to effectively sum up how Meta and its peers see themselves in relation to the law.
Cultural tides turn on social media
Yet the new film’s existence also tells a potent truth: public fascination no longer centers on the ascent of social media’s tycoons, but their fall. That’s where the story is now.
In a recent opinion piece for The Guardian, former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich asks how much longer society will tolerate being the canary in “an extremely dangerous coalmine.” His subject is AI, but the men he points to are the same ones that gave us social media, and the point is transferable.
“We’re watching all of this roll out as if we have no choice, as if it’s inevitable, as if AI is just something we’re going to have to adapt to,” Reich says. “But why should we have to adapt to it, when it is the product of people like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg and Dario Amodei? Why should we be confined to being spectators at their enormously dangerous game? Why should we have to accept all these hugely negative, potentially life-threatening consequences?”
“The fact is, we don’t.”
Social media is facing the most pushback it has ever faced. It does not like age checks, and will almost certainly use the French ruling as a springboard to promote its profiling systems, which it markets as age inference. But that may end up being a short chapter in the larger epic, which is the story of a society realizing it has created a monster too big to control, and coming to terms with what it really means to fix the problem.
Verifymy points to email checks
One man has a concrete answer. In remarks sent to Biometric Update, Andy Lulham, chief operating officer at online safety provider Verifymy, says that the French committee’s decision “puts more weight on safeguarding technology that finds the right line between protecting children and freedom of expression.”
“Age checks will be the standard bearer here,” he says. “Methods like email-based and mobile phone checks shield minors while respecting privacy concerns and remaining largely frictionless for users.”
“Importantly, because social platforms already require an email address or mobile number as part of the account creation process, checking an adult user’s age can be done quickly and unobtrusively in the background using existing information.”
His comments surface an important point – perhaps the most important point for the biometrics industry. The legislative debate tends to put all online age checks into a barrel, where they exist, conceptually, as a single idea. But the age assurance market is already diverse, and a solution that satisfies French law is likely already in circulation.
In a post on LinkedIn, Matthew Newman, global chief correspondent at MLex Market Insight, writes that the French decision shows how “age assurance is not an implementation detail. It is part of the regulatory architecture.”
“Once age becomes a condition of access, the intervention creates a data governance problem affecting every user, not only minors. Who verifies age, what is disclosed, to whom and for how long? The question is no longer simply whether age-based restrictions are proportionate. It is whether the architecture used to enforce them can be proportionate, privacy-preserving and constitutionally defensible.”
Newman notes that “Brazil is already addressing this layer explicitly, including privacy-preserving approaches such as zero-knowledge proofs and double-blind age assurance models.”
The double-blind model is already enshrined in France’s law imposing age assurance requirements on pornographic websites. It is well within France’s reach to adopt it for social media. Emmanuel Macron says he is not giving up, and has already announced his intention to examine the constitutional concerns and initiate a new version of the bill, instructing Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu to present a revised version by spring 2027. As such, this is almost certainly not the end of age assurance for social media in France, but merely another turn in the journey toward accountability for Big Tech.
Article Topics
biometric age estimation | EU age verification | Europe | France | regulation | VerifyMy
