France’s attempt to ban children under 15 from accessing social media has exposed the constitutional and practical limits of blanket age-based restrictions, but the debate over protecting young users is far from over.
The country’s Constitutional Council blocked the legislation after finding that the proposed ban disproportionately interfered with freedom of expression and communication and did not provide sufficient safeguards. The ruling was a setback for President Emmanuel Macron, who has since asked Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu to prepare a revised proposal.
For Dr. Rebecca Y. Akatue, a digital security and AI governance expert, France’s failed under-15 social media ban highlights need for platform-specific child protections.
In an interview with The Vaultz News, she opined that the central lesson is that protecting children online should not necessarily mean treating every minor or every platform in the same way. Instead, she asserted that governments and technology companies should move toward a combination of age-appropriate design, stronger safety controls and platform-specific content moderation.
Dr. Akatue said, “The ban is blunted and it’s unconstitutional because it treats all the minors on the platform the same,” arguing that a more targeted approach would better reflect the different risks faced by children of different ages and the distinct characteristics of social media platforms.
The European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA), she noted, already provides a framework for addressing risks to minors on online platforms. Rather than pursuing a wholesale prohibition, policymakers should use that framework to require platforms to build protections into their services.
Dr. Akatue’s first recommendation is to make online experiences more explicitly age-appropriate. Rather than assuming that every person under 15 faces identical risks, platforms could introduce different protections based on age and the nature of the service.
“You have to treat the platforms too separately. What you share in WhatsApp may not be as harmful as what you share in TikTok or Instagram.”
Dr. Rebecca Y. Akatue
That could translate into concrete design obligations. On platforms such as TikTok or Instagram, for instance, policymakers could require stronger restrictions on unsolicited contact from strangers, prohibit targeted advertising to minors and ensure that advertising shown to young users is age-appropriate. The objective, Akatue said, should be to make safety protections part of the architecture of the service.
A second area of concern is the design of social media itself, which makes it addictive. Dr. Akatue pointed to features such as autoplay, endless scrolling and recommendation systems that continuously direct users from one piece of content to another. While these mechanisms are designed to maintain engagement, she argues that existing safeguards may not be sufficiently effective for minors.
For young users, she believes platforms should be required to introduce stronger controls aimed at reducing potentially addictive patterns of use. These could include meaningful time-management tools, limits on certain recommendation mechanisms and stronger default settings for minors.
The responsibility, however, should not rest solely with parents. Akatue advocates a model of co-regulation, in which governments, platforms, parents, educators and other stakeholders share responsibility for creating a safer online environment.
Parents should have tools to set reasonable time limits and establish safeguards around whom their children can interact with, she said, while respecting the child’s own right to privacy. “You can have safeguards and control the child. Give the child time limits, monitor who goes to…, who he’s chatting with, not the message,” she said.
The third element is content moderation. Dr. Akatue emphasized that platforms should be required to identify and restrict age-inappropriate material quickly, rather than relying primarily on users to report harmful content after it has already reached children. She said that platforms should also have systems capable of detecting inappropriate material “as soon as it surfaces.”
She also called for regular audits of platforms to establish whether companies are actually implementing the safeguards they claim to have. That external scrutiny could become particularly important as platforms increasingly rely on algorithms and artificial intelligence to recommend and moderate content.
The Problem With Blanket Bans
Additionally, Dr. Akatue cautioned that prohibiting access entirely could have unintended consequences. “If you ban it, they will go to another place and explore as minors,” she said, pointing to the possibility that young people could attempt to circumvent restrictions through tools such as VPNs or migrate to less regulated online spaces.
She described this as a potential “balloon effect,” in which restricting access to mainstream platforms could push some minors toward lesser-known services with weaker safety controls. That concern does not mean age restrictions have no role, but it suggests that restrictions should be combined with measures that address the underlying risks of online activity.
The DSA framework, she said, points toward risk assessment and additional obligations for very large online platforms, alongside protections concerning minors, privacy and age assurance.
Privacy remains a key challenge
Any system designed to determine whether someone is a child must also confront a difficult privacy question: how can platforms verify age without requiring people to surrender excessive personal information?
Akatue stated that emerging technologies, including AI-based approaches, are being explored to determine whether a user is likely to be a minor without necessarily collecting large amounts of identifying information.
“These technologies are still evolving. AI is trying to push those technologies to be able to assess that a child is accessing and then use the necessary safeguard to prevent the children from accessing unnecessary content.”
Dr. Rebecca Y. Akatue
That tension between effective age assurance and data minimisation is likely to remain central to the European debate.
France’s ruling therefore may prove less a rejection of stronger online protections for children than a warning about how those protections are designed. The challenge for policymakers will be to move from a simple question of whether children should be allowed on social media to what protections should platforms be legally required to provide, for which users, and under what privacy safeguards?
For Akatue, the answer lies not in one universal ban but in a layered system in which age-appropriate defaults, platform-specific safety requirements, parental tools, media literacy, content moderation and independent audits work together.
That approach, she argues, can pursue the legitimate goal of protecting minors while avoiding a measure so broad that it compromises fundamental rights.
