Banning teens from social media without knowing how

On July 21, the French Senate voted 243 to 2 to ban social media for anyone under 15, and the National Assembly followed a few hours later, 279 to 81^[1]. France becomes the first country in the European Union to go this far. A margin like that ought to reassure me, except that laws nobody argues about are rarely laws whose details anyone examined, and I'm stuck in an uncomfortable spot, sold on the principle and skeptical of nearly everything else.

What the law actually bans

Written by deputy Laure Miller, the law bars under-15s from signing up to any social network at all, with a handful of carve-outs for things like online encyclopedias and open-source educational projects^[2]. New accounts fall under it on September 1, 2026, existing ones on January 1, 2027, which leaves four months to verify who is already signed up. The text also bans phones in high schools, extending what already applies in primary and middle schools. Socialist deputies have referred it to the Constitutional Council, which has a month to rule^[1:1].

The science is on the lawmakers' side

This is the half I have no doubts about. On January 13, 2026, the French health and safety agency Anses published an expert review of 11- to 17-year-olds describing a cluster of risks rather than a single harm, disrupted sleep, eroded self-worth, body-image disorders, cyberbullying and risk-taking, with effects that stack up in the most vulnerable and hit girls harder^[3]. Separately, a team from Corentin-Celton hospital, Université Paris Cité and Inserm published a microsimulation in PLoS Medicine covering 18.6 million adolescents born between 1990 and 2012, linking heavy social media use to 590,000 extra cases of depression^[4]. The number that stopped me is a different one, though. Annual depression prevalence among French adolescents went from 2 percent in 2014 to 9 percent in 2021.

The literature is less settled than the op-eds, so it pays to slow down. Back in 2019, Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski showed across more than 350,000 adolescents that screen use explained at most 0.4 percent of the variation in well-being, less than regularly eating potatoes, and that wearing glasses did more damage^[5]. The microsimulation authors say plainly that their model establishes no causal link. What the evidence describes is a modest average effect that turns severe for a minority, which is the standard shape of a public health problem and, conveniently, the standard shape of a subject people caricature in both directions.

My conviction rests on that minority. A teenager with parents watching, parents who know how to shut the tap off, will probably come through fine. The one who finds a bottomless feed alone at eleven has nobody doing that, and a general rule is defensible precisely for him.

Australia already ran the experiment

Except the experiment exists, and it doesn't argue for effectiveness. Australia has banned social media for under-16s since December 10, 2025, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, Facebook and Reddit included. A research team surveyed 408 adolescents aged 12 to 17 just before the rules took effect and again three months later, and published in The BMJ on June 24, 2026^[6].

More than 85 percent of under-16s were still using the covered platforms, between half and two thirds of them from their own accounts. Daily use among 14- and 15-year-olds fell from 78 to 69 percent, 12- and 13-year-olds didn't budge, and the over-16s climbed from 80 to 89 percent. Fake accounts accounted for 15 to 19 percent of respondents, private browsing 6 to 11 percent. The most instructive finding isn't the workarounds, though. Most of the minors still online hadn't needed one, because the platforms simply never identified their accounts or removed them. The sample is small, concentrated in New South Wales and self-reported, as the authors say themselves, and they note that any real effect will take years to surface. Three months in, the law's clearest achievement was a spike in the VPN charts.

The text lost its enforcer along the way

The strangest part is what the joint committee took out. Arcom, the French media regulator, vanished from the text entirely, along with the power it was meant to have to designate risky platforms and penalize the ones that ignored the rules. The rapporteur justified it by arguing that a blacklist of banned networks would expose France to breaching the EU Digital Services Act^[2:1]. The argument holds. The result holds up rather less, and Socialist senator David Ros put it bluntly, noting that nothing is left specifying how age gets verified or how anyone gets penalized.

What survives is the obligation itself, tucked into France's digital economy act, and the hope that the European regulation expected within a year fills the hole. A law that forbids without saying by what means looks a lot like an intention, and intentions have rarely stopped a determined fourteen-year-old from opening an account.

My ID goes where, exactly

Here's the other half of my discomfort, and it doesn't stop at teenagers. Verifying everyone's age means somebody, somewhere, looks at an identity document or a face, and that somebody is now an industry. Persona, one of its most visible players, already verifies users for Reddit and Roblox, runs 269 separate checks per identity, and raised 150 then 200 million dollars from Founders Fund, Peter Thiel's firm, Thiel being the co-founder of Palantir^[7]. Discord trialed the service in the United Kingdom before ending the partnership in February 2026, the backlash having outpaced the rollout^[8].

The worst case isn't hypothetical, either. It already happened. In October 2025, a Discord vendor handling support and age verification was compromised, and roughly 70,000 users had their ID photos potentially exposed, with the attackers claiming a far bigger haul^[9]. You can't rotate a passport the way you rotate a password, and I would rather not find mine in a bulk catalog somewhere.

France already has the right technical answer sitting on a shelf. The standard Arcom published in October 2024, endorsed by the CNIL and in force for pornography sites since January 2025, requires double anonymity, an arrangement where the site learns you're an adult without learning who you are, while the verifier learns who you are without learning where you go^[10]. That is exactly what should be generalized. It is also what the new law mentions nowhere, having dismissed the authority that wrote it.

As for whether a block holds, France has that answer too. When age verification became mandatory on pornography sites, Pornhub's owner chose to shut its French operation instead, and VPN installations jumped more than 300 percent in two days, with one provider reporting ten times its usual signups^[11]. A fourteen-year-old discovering VPNs thanks to a law meant to protect him is a teaching outcome nobody costed in.

What I'm hoping for anyway

I wouldn't want the skepticism to read as opposition. The health findings are solid, the waiting had gone on long enough, and I'll take a flawed law over three more years of parliamentary reports. My daughter isn't old enough to ask me about any of this, and our controller gets passed back and forth with no algorithm involved, but that conversation is coming sooner than I think.

Between now and then, everything will be settled in the implementing decrees and the European regulation, which is to say in the documents nobody reads. I'd like to find double anonymity in them, a hard ban on retaining anything, and enforcement handed to an actual body rather than to the general mood. Otherwise we'll have banned teenagers from social media and handed our papers to companies we've never heard of, which is a lot of damage for a problem left unsolved.