The right to be online by Jiro Lambert

There is something deeply revealing about the French government’s attempt to ban social media for under-15s: it assumes that the best way to protect young people from the digital world is to remove them from it.

The instinct is understandable. Parents are exhausted by the relentless intrusion of smartphones into childhood. Social media companies have spent years designing platforms to capture attention, monetize insecurity and keep users scrolling. Children encounter bullying, sexual exploitation, dangerous challenges, misinformation and algorithmically amplified misery. Anyone pretending otherwise is selling something.

But good intentions do not automatically produce good laws. France’s Constitutional Council was right to resist the temptation to turn parental anxiety into a sweeping prohibition. The proposed ban was not merely a rule about age. It required a vast machinery of age verification and applied broadly across platforms whose purposes and risks are hardly identical. The court’s objection was therefore larger than TikTok or Snapchat. It was about whether a democratic state can restrict communication first and ask questions about proportionality later.

It cannot. There is an increasingly fashionable political idea that children can be protected by simply banning whatever frightens adults. Social media is merely the latest target. Before it were television, comic books, rock music, video games and the internet itself. Every generation discovers a new technology that appears uniquely capable of corrupting the young.

Sometimes the technology really is dangerous. But the answer cannot always be prohibition. A fifteen-year-old is not a sealed biological container who suddenly acquires constitutional rights on a birthday. Teenagers communicate, organize, learn, joke, discover music, follow politics, maintain friendships and encounter ideas online. For some, particularly those who feel isolated in their physical surroundings, digital communities can be a genuine social lifeline.

The argument for defending screen time, then, is not an argument for defending Silicon Valley’s business model. Quite the opposite. Governments should be much tougher on the companies themselves.

If an algorithm is deliberately engineered to maximize compulsive engagement, regulate the algorithm. If platforms expose children to harmful material, impose meaningful duties on the platforms. If companies collect excessive personal information, restrict the collection. If age verification requires every adult to surrender intimate identity data simply to watch a video or participate in a discussion, question the architecture rather than normalizing surveillance.

And give parents something better than a legal switch labelled CHILD: OFF. The French court’s ruling does not mean children should be abandoned to the internet. It means protection must be intelligent enough to distinguish between a dangerous platform feature and communication itself. It means that freedom of expression cannot become a privilege adults possess while children merely await permission to inherit it.

There is also an uncomfortable political lesson here. Banning social media is wonderfully attractive politics because it creates the impression of action. Politicians can announce that they are protecting children and appear decisive within a single press conference. Designing safer digital systems, funding education, strengthening families and forcing technology companies to change their incentives is considerably harder.

The smartphone is not going away. The internet is not going away. Childhood itself is changing. The answer should not be to pretend otherwise. France has offered a useful democratic reminder: protecting children does not require treating them as citizens without voices. The challenge is not keeping young people offline. It is making the online world worthy of their presence.