No — not currently. The bill’s official title is “Proposition de loi visant a proteger les mineurs des risques auxquels les expose l’utilisation des reseaux sociaux” — “Bill to protect minors from the risks to which the use of social networks exposes them” — Assemblee nationale text no. 2107, 17th legislature. It has not been promulgated (published in the Journal Officiel) in its adopted form, because the Conseil constitutionnel found part of it unconstitutional before promulgation. That’s the normal French process for a law like this: a priori review, before a law takes effect, not after.

The final adopted text was stripped down to one operative rule: access to an online social network service provided by an online platform is prohibited for minors under fifteen years old. It listed exemptions for online encyclopedias, educational or scientific directories, and open-source software development platforms — but named no specific commercial platform, such as TikTok or Instagram, anywhere in the text. That vagueness is part of what the Constitutional Council objected to: the ban would have applied to numerous online communication services without distinguishing between a platform’s actual risk profile, content moderation practices, or specific features.

The Council found Article 1 unconstitutional on two connected grounds.

The struck-down text applied to “minors under fifteen years old” — anyone who has not yet turned 15 — with no separate treatment for a 13-year-old versus a 14-year-old. It applied to “an online social network service” as a category, not a named list. Earlier committee drafts and secondary reporting referenced Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and Facebook by name, with YouTube and WhatsApp treated differently for their “social” features versus their core service — but that platform-specific framing came from earlier drafts, not the final Article 1 language, and is now moot.

The immediate political trigger was a fatal stabbing at a school in eastern France, after which Macron said in June 2026 he would push for EU-level under-15 restrictions. That sits on top of a longer-running set of concerns cited by French officials and child-safety advocates: cyberbullying, sleep disruption, addictive algorithmic design, exposure to harmful or sexualized content, and body-image pressure, particularly for adolescent girls.

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child recognizes children’s rights to freedom of expression, access to information, and participation — rights a blanket platform ban necessarily restricts. That tension is exactly what the Constitutional Council’s ruling turned on: it’s not that protecting minors is illegitimate, but that a single age cutoff applied without regard for a specific minor’s maturity, family circumstances, or a service’s actual risk profile oversteps what’s proportionate. Digital-rights advocates have also raised a related, second-order concern: platforms hosting LGBTQ+ youth support communities, exam-stress peer groups, or hobby and interest communities often function as genuine social lifelines for teenagers, and a blunt age cutoff doesn’t distinguish those from purely entertainment-driven use.

Any workable age gate requires some way to determine a user is under 15 — meaning either the platform, or a third party it trusts, has to know something about that user’s age it doesn’t currently need to know. No age-verification method is currently mandated in France for this purpose: the July 20, 2026 joint committee removed the clause that would have let Arcom compel platforms to build verification systems, before the law even passed.

CNIL, France’s data-protection regulator, has for years advocated a “double anonymity” model: a certified third party confirms a user’s age to a platform without revealing their identity, so the platform never sees identity documents directly. The European Commission is separately developing an EU-wide age-verification approach using cryptographic “zero-knowledge proofs,” tied to the EU digital identity wallet expected to roll out from late 2026 — a possible future technical path, not a current one.

The technical tradeoffs are real regardless of which method wins: identity-document checks are accurate but privacy-invasive; facial age estimation is less invasive but has known false-positive and false-negative rates precisely at the 13-16 boundary, the hardest age range to estimate visually; and self-declaration, the current de facto standard on most platforms, verifies nothing at all.

Under the law that was just struck down: no — it had no parental-consent exception, which the Constitutional Council flagged as part of the disproportionality problem. That’s a different model from France’s existing, separate 2023 law (part of the broader “majorite numerique” — digital majority — framework), which requires platforms to obtain parental consent before an under-15 can open an account, rather than banning access outright. That 2023 law remains technically in force, but its rollout has been hampered by similar technical and EU-regulatory friction, and enforcement has been limited in practice. Don’t confuse the two: one is a consent-based framework (2023, still standing, weakly enforced); the other was an unconditional ban (2026, struck down before taking effect).

No other EU member state currently has an equivalent under-15 blanket social-media ban in force. The European Commission’s July 6, 2026 “detailed opinion” — issued under the EU’s technical-regulations notification procedure, Directive 2015/1535 — said the French bill, as drafted, risked conflicting with the Digital Services Act, and that opinion alone extended France’s mandatory pre-implementation standstill period to August 10, 2026, independent of anything the Conseil constitutionnel later did. That’s a structural tension worth naming plainly: the DSA is built around harmonized rules for how platforms operate across the EU’s single market, and a single member state imposing its own stricter access rule creates exactly the kind of fragmentation the DSA was designed to prevent. Other European countries, including Spain, Italy, Belgium and Germany, have discussed similar restrictions, but none has passed comparable legislation as of this writing.

With Article 1 voided, there is currently no French-specific enforcement mechanism, penalty structure, or active Arcom mandate tied to this particular law. Arcom’s broader existing authority — including its established age-verification framework for pornographic sites — was the model some earlier drafts referenced for social media, but the compulsion power specific to this bill was removed before the final vote. CNIL’s role remains advisory and standard-setting (its recommendations for age verification, its “double anonymity” model) rather than an active enforcement one for this specific measure, since the measure isn’t in force. No penalties — for platforms, parents, or children — currently apply. Nothing in any reporting reviewed for this article suggests children themselves would face penalties even under the struck-down version; enforcement, where it existed in draft form, targeted platforms only.

France’s mobile-phone-in-schools policy is a different, already-active measure: phones have been restricted in French middle schools (college) since the 2025 school year under the “portable en pause” program, extending to high schools (lycee) starting the 2026 school year. That policy sits in the same broader legislative package as the social-media bill in some reporting, but it is legally and procedurally distinct — it was not part of what the Constitutional Council struck down, and it remains in effect independent of the social-media law’s status.