France has banned children under 15 from using social media, effectively becoming the first major European country to draw a hard legal line around childhood online.
In doing so, it has also become the mirror the United States should probably be looking into because, as other democracies have decided that childhood deserves legal boundaries online, America is still arguing over which institution is supposed to draw them.
Australia has already enacted one of the world’s toughest restrictions, requiring social media platforms to take reasonable steps to prevent under-16s from creating or maintaining accounts. Britain has tightened child-safety rules under the Online Safety Act, requiring stronger age verification and safer feeds for services used by children. France is now racing to implement its under-15 ban before the new school year.
The United States, by contrast, has reached much of the same diagnosis but cannot seem to agree on the treatment. Why? A number of factors are at play.
It’s a familiar American problem: endless jurisdictional debates, red tape and a perpetual game of passing the baton. Congress waits on the courts, the courts wait on the states and the states wait on Congress. Every branch of government treats the issue as someone else’s responsibility, making it remarkably difficult to pass the kinds of laws that actually change people’s day-to-day lives.
That’s not to say those same institutions haven’t recognized the problem. The U.S. Surgeon General, for example, has warned that the country “cannot conclude social media is sufficiently safe for children and adolescents,” while federal researchers have documented links between frequent social media use and bullying victimization, persistent sadness, hopelessness and increased suicide risk among high school students.
Yet Washington has failed to pass a national child online safety law. The Kids Online Safety Act remains the most prominent federal proposal, but the broader debate has splintered into state legislation, school phone bans, platform-design lawsuits and privacy fights over age verification. That fragmentation is the American story on this issue and almost every other major problem the country has to deal with.
As a result, the most likely path forward is not a French-style national ban but a distinctly American version of the same idea, one driven by states, courts, school districts and regulators that may eventually force national recognition.
States are already testing the outer limits of what courts will allow. Utah, Arkansas, Texas, Florida and Louisiana have all pursued various combinations of parental consent requirements, age verification, design restrictions and limits on minors’ accounts. Some laws have been blocked, others narrowed and several remain tied up in litigation.
The courts are becoming another battlefield.
In March, a Los Angeles jury found that negligence by YouTube and Meta substantially contributed to harming a young woman who argued she became addicted to social media as a child, awarding damages in a case now on appeal.
The case matters because it targeted platform features such as autoplay and recommendation algorithms rather than simply blaming harmful third-party content, which is an argument designed to sidestep the legal protections technology companies have relied upon for decades.
That is where the United States differs from France or Australia: American regulation is unlikely to arrive as one sweeping national law.
It is more likely to emerge through cumulative pressure: one state law, one school district policy, one jury verdict, one insurance calculation and one congressional compromise at a time. Slow, fragmented and often frustrating but eventually (hopefully!) difficult to ignore.
Support for stronger protections also extends well beyond party lines.
Pediatric organizations, mental health professionals and the American Psychological Association have all warned about the risks social media poses to children. Parents’ groups, state attorneys general, child-safety advocates and lawmakers from both parties increasingly agree that something needs to change, even if they disagree over whether the answer is age bans, design requirements, parental controls, privacy protections or litigation.
At the very least, the issue has brought disparate forces together.
It’s important to note that the opposition to potential regulation on social media use by kids isn’t simply “Big Tech says no” (although that’s also part of the problem).
Civil liberties organizations and many technologists argue that age verification could require intrusive identity checks, threaten privacy, chill speech and ultimately push teenagers toward workarounds.
Early research on Australia’s restrictions suggests many young people already view the bans as unfair or ineffective and have found ways to circumvent them, which is likely what will happen in the U.S. as well down the line given the combative nature of its citizenry.
There is, of course, a financial dimension as well.
Meta generated nearly $201 billion in revenue in 2025, almost all of it from advertising.
Alphabet brought in more than $402 billion, including over $40 billion from YouTube advertising alone. These companies sit at the center of American advertising, entertainment, politics, small business and technological dominance so any meaningful regulation of children’s access would inevitably affect their business models and, by extension, sectors of the broader economy.
In short, the United States may never embrace the clean national bans seen in France or Australia because the First Amendment, federalism, privacy concerns and Silicon Valley’s economic influence all pull in the opposite direction.
Then again, tobacco warning labels once seemed politically impossible, state-by-state marijuana legalization looked chaotic before it reshaped national policy, same-sex marriage moved through states and courts long before federal recognition followed. Perhaps this is simply how America changes: not through one decisive law, but through accumulation.
And if that’s the route America ultimately takes here, so be it. The debate over what these companies stand to lose financially is worth having, but it shouldn’t eclipse what children stand to lose while the country keeps deliberating.
At some point, the bigger risk isn’t regulating social media but it’s continuing to pretend the status quo isn’t already costing us something far more difficult to measure.
