The under-15 internet by Jennifer Stephenson

France has decided that children under 15 should not use social media. This sounds wonderfully decisive, which is perhaps the first problem. Legislators adore a clean age threshold because reality, unfortunately, refuses to organise itself into tidy birthdays.

The French Parliament’s ban, backed by Emmanuel Macron, follows Australia’s pioneering restriction. The political attraction is obvious. Social media is blamed, with considerable justification, for anxiety, compulsive behaviour, bullying, sexual exploitation, distorted body image and the peculiar modern experience of watching a child spend three hours scrolling through strangers while ignoring the human beings sitting beside them.

It offers politicians the comforting spectacle of action. A ban can be announced, defended and celebrated in headlines. The quieter work of redesigning incentives, enforcing standards and teaching families is slower, costlier and far less photogenic.

Yet banning something does not make it disappear. It merely changes the relationship between the forbidden and the forbidden person. The teenager who is told that TikTok, Instagram or whatever app currently occupies the cultural throne is off-limits will not necessarily nod solemnly, close the laptop and take up knitting. More likely, he or she will ask a friend for an account, alter a birth date, borrow a parent’s phone, use a VPN, or migrate to some new corner of the internet whose name adults have not yet learned to pronounce.

This is the great theatrical weakness of social-media prohibition: it confuses a legal boundary with a technological one. A law can prohibit entry. It cannot easily prevent reinvention. Platforms can deploy age estimation, identity checks and parental controls, but none is perfect. Every additional verification system also raises awkward questions about privacy, surveillance and the creation of vast databases containing information about children who, supposedly, are being protected.

There is a deeper irony. Governments are attempting to police the front door while the internet has become an enormous building with windows, fire escapes and several holes in the roof. Remove one platform and another appears. Shut one account and a dozen group chats remain. The young are not merely consumers of social media; they are exceptionally capable inhabitants of digital culture. They adapt faster than regulation.

That does not mean doing nothing. Quite the opposite. The case for protecting children online is powerful. But the sensible target should be the architecture of platforms rather than the fantasy of perfect exclusion. Companies should face serious penalties for addictive design aimed at children, algorithmic amplification of harmful material, predatory advertising and inadequate responses to abuse. Schools should teach digital literacy with the same seriousness once given to physical education. Parents need practical tools, not merely another moral panic.

And children themselves should be treated as citizens in training, not as trespassers to be expelled from a digital public square. A fifteen-year-old is not suddenly transformed at midnight on a birthday into a mature internet user. Nor is a fourteen-year-old necessarily incapable of understanding risks.

France may discover that its ban produces impressive statistics and unimpressive reality. The number of officially registered under-15 accounts may fall. The number of under-15 children actually online may barely move.

The real challenge is less glamorous: making the internet safer without pretending that legislation can repeal adolescence. Governments can draw lines. Teenagers, as history repeatedly demonstrates, are remarkably interested in crossing them.