French court blocks Macron’s social media ban for children under 15

A French court just told Macron that protecting kids from Instagram and TikTok is somehow a bridge too far for the state to cross, and that tells you everything about how tangled up European law has become with its own free-expression doctrines. Whatever you think of banning fourteen-year-olds from social media, the law had actually gone through the legislature. Lawmakers passed it in July. It was set to take effect this fall. And a court stepped in and killed it anyway.

We're not naive about heavy-handed age-verification schemes. They can be clumsy, they can be evaded with a fake birthdate in about four seconds, and they raise real privacy questions. But the reasoning that struck this one down isn't really about those practical flaws. It's about a judicial class deciding that a democratically enacted child-safety measure runs into free speech and free expression protections that apparently extend further to a fourteen-year-old's right to an Instagram account than to a parent's right to have lawmakers set boundaries for their kids.

This is the same argument American courts have had over kids and phones, minus the part where our side actually wants government out of it entirely. Macron isn't exactly our guy, but give him this much: he saw a real problem, teenagers marinating in algorithmic feeds designed by adults who don't have their interests at heart, and he tried to do something concrete about it through elected representatives. A court overruled the people's representatives on the theory that minors have an unimpeachable right to scroll.

If there's a lesson in this for American conservatives, it's not "France bad." It's that when courts anywhere start treating every regulation of Big Tech as a free-speech violation, actual parents lose the argument before it even starts. That fight isn't confined to Paris.