The decision lands about two weeks before the ban was due to start, Bloomberg reported. Platforms were to stop creating accounts for under-15s from 1 September.
Parliament gave the law final approval on 21 July. The desk covered that final vote at the time.
What the Council ruled
The Council struck down the ban on freedom of expression grounds. It found the restriction was “une atteinte qui n’est pas adaptée, nécessaire et proportionnée”, Brut reported.
In English, that is an infringement which is not suited, necessary or proportionate to the objective pursued.
It raised the scope of the ban as a specific problem. The prohibition reached services where “les risques pour la santé et la sécurité des mineurs (…) ne sont pas établis”, meaning risks to the health and safety of minors are not established.
The second ground was privacy. On age verification, the Council found that the legislator had not provided the legal guarantees needed to protect private life.
What the law would have done
Article 1 covered a wide list of services. It reached TikTok, Snapchat, X, Instagram, the social features of YouTube, messaging apps including WhatsApp and Messenger, and some online games.
The scope is what made the ruling possible. A single article had to justify itself across services with very different records, and the Council found the evidence did not stretch that far.
The text names no platform. It applies to services meeting the definition of a social network under France’s 2004 digital confidence law.
The timetable had two dates, according to LCP, the parliamentary channel. New accounts stopped on 1 September, and a four-month transition for existing accounts ran to 1 January 2027.
Exemptions covered online encyclopedias, educational directories and open-source educational software.
The part that survives
Schools are unaffected by the ruling. The smartphone ban extending to lycées still starts on 1 September.
The reason is procedural rather than substantive. The Council was asked about Article 1 alone, so it did not rule on the rest of the law.
The education minister made the case for that provision on attention and concentration. Primary and secondary schools already operated bans, and the law carries it up to sixth-form level.
Who brought the challenge
La France Insoumise referred the law to the Council in July, Generation-NT reported. The party argued on two constitutional grounds.
The first was freedom of expression and communication. LFI said the general and absolute character of the ban made it a disproportionate restriction.
The second was privacy, under the 1789 Declaration. Both grounds appear in the decision.
LFI also argued the ban treated unlike things alike. Social platforms serve socialisation, access to information and civic engagement, it said, and different services carry different risks.
The enforcement was removed before this
The law reaching the Council was already weaker than the one proposed. Parliament stripped the age-verification mandate before the final vote, TechTimes reported.
The original text required platforms to submit verification proposals to Arcom, the audiovisual regulator, for approval by 1 September. That requirement went, along with Arcom’s power to impose measures on platforms that missed the deadline.
A section amending the penal code on parental negligence also went. The adopted law specifies no penalties.
Verification was left to the platforms, subject to approval by CNIL, the privacy regulator. No method was specified, so document checks, facial age estimation or other approaches would all have qualified.
The case the government made
Ministers presented the law as child protection rather than speech regulation. The government put the ban at the centre of its digital policy for the school year.
Polling was part of the argument. An Arcom study in July found more than two-thirds of 10 to 14-year-olds supported the ban, according to reporting on the decision.
French media described the ruling as a setback for Emmanuel Macron, who had backed the measure publicly. The presidency had pushed the September start date.
How this sits beside the other bans
Australia is the comparison everyone reaches for, and it is instructive on penalties. Its under-16 ban carries fines up to A$49.5m, and a study six months in found 85% of that age group still using the platforms.
France was going to attempt the same thing with no fines in the text. Enforcement would have rested on the EU Digital Services Act, which allows penalties of up to 6% of global turnover.
That route has not yet produced a child-safety penalty, TechTimes noted. The Commission has opened cases, and none had ended in a confirmed compliance order on this ground.
Australia has since moved the argument to the device layer. Meta is pressing for the operating systems to supply the age signal rather than the platforms.
The United States has taken that route through the courts. The Supreme Court let Texas turn Apple and Google into an age gate for app downloads.
Brussels is working on its own version. Ursula von der Leyen said the Commission will propose limits on children using social media, with member states still split between 13, 15 and 16.
What happens next
The censure removes Article 1 from the law. Parliament would have to write a new one to revive the ban.
The decision sets out what such a text would have to do. It would need a narrower scope tied to established risks, and legal guarantees around age verification that this version lacked.
The EU proposal is the other route. A measure agreed in Brussels would not face the same French constitutional review.
The school smartphone rules still take effect on 1 September, and the parts of the law outside Article 1 stand.
Two things will show whether this was a pause or an ending. The first is whether the government tables a narrower text before the school year settles, and the second is what age the Commission lands on.
France has now tested the strongest version of the argument in a constitutional court and lost. Every government drafting one of these laws in Europe has a written list of what not to do.
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