France just became the first EU country to ban social media for anyone under 15, joining a global wave of governments that want to do the job parents used to do — and build the surveillance infrastructure to pull it off.
The law, championed by Emmanuel Macron, passed France's National Assembly 279 to 81 on Tuesday and takes effect September 1 for new accounts. Existing accounts for minors get shuttered by January 2027. It also bans cellphones in high schools. Australia went further last December, blocking anyone under 16 from platforms including TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook, with fines up to $34.9 million for noncompliance. Britain plans its own under-16 ban by Spring 2027. Denmark, Norway, Poland, Greece, Malaysia, and India are all moving in the same direction. The EU itself is expected to introduce bloc-wide measures in September.
The pattern is unmistakable: family authority over children's digital lives has collapsed, and governments are rushing to fill the vacuum.
Parents in France are desperate for help, and for good reason. France's health watchdog reported that 90% of children aged 12 to 17 use smartphones daily to access the internet, with 58% on social networks. French regulator Arcom says kids 12 to 17 spend an average of 1 hour and 21 minutes a day on TikTok alone, where the recommendation algorithm pushes what Arcom calls the most "extreme" content — anxiety-inducing videos, self-harm material, and worse. Several French families have sued TikTok over teen suicides they say are linked to harmful content.
Gaëlle Berbonde, a mother in the Paris region, told the Associated Press her daughter got a smartphone in seventh grade. Within months, the girl was cutting herself, suffering from anorexia and depression, and spent a year and a half in the hospital. "We have no other option, no other way to counter tech giants," Berbonde said. "The only thing we can do is protect our children, just as we protect our children from drinking alcohol."
But the state's solution comes with its own costs. Enforcing these bans requires universal age verification — which means everyone, adult and child alike, must prove who they are before going online. France's digital minister, Anne Le Hénanff, acknowledged as much: "For four months, all of us in France will have to prove our age." The EU has already unveiled its own age verification app now being tested across member states. Left-wing lawmakers in France opposed the bill, warning it would effectively end online anonymity. The New York Times noted that early evidence suggests Australia's ban has "largely failed" to keep young teenagers off social media.
Macron, for his part, framed the crackdown in nationalist terms: "The brains of our children and our teenagers are not for sale," he said in January. "Neither by American platforms nor by Chinese algorithms."
CNN and The Guardian framed the law as a straightforward child-protection victory. The Times buried the lede — that Australia's version isn't working — deep in its piece. Breitbart highlighted the parents' anguish and the left's opposition. None of the outlets seriously grappled with the trade-off: a government that can verify every user's age to protect children is a government that can verify every user's age, period.
The real crisis isn't that kids are on TikTok. It's that parents have been left powerless against both algorithmic manipulation and state overreach — and the state is offering to solve the problem it helped create with more of the same thing: control.
