French National Assembly Approves Under-15 Social-Media Ban

Paris’ move echoes earlier moral-panic legislation such as the 1936 French decree limiting cinema access for minors after concerns about “decadent” American films, and the 1998 U.S. Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act; each tried to retrofit child-protection norms onto disruptive media technologies. Over the past two decades Europe has steadily shifted from laissez-faire internet governance toward muscular digital sovereignty—the GDPR in 2016, the Digital Services Act in 2022, and now age-gating efforts that extend that logic to children’s mental health and geostrategic worries about U.S./Chinese platforms. Whether the law survives EU legal scrutiny or the practical challenge of verifying millions of teens matters less than the precedent: states are asserting that protecting minors outweighs the once-sacrosanct principle of unfettered online expression. On a century horizon, this represents a swing of the regulatory pendulum—technology liberalises, society reacts—suggesting future networks (AR, brain-computer interfaces) will likely meet similar age-based firewalls rather than the early-internet ideal of borderless freedom.