Today France's Constitutional Council blocked a law that had already passed the National Assembly 116 votes to 23: a ban on social media for anyone under fifteen, championed by President Macron since a school stabbing put the question in front of him personally. The Council's objection was not procedural. It said the ban infringes freedom of expression — Article 11 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the same clause that has anchored French speech law since
Put next to the rest of the world's docket this year, France is the odd one out in a specific way. Since late 2024 the wave has been close to universal: Australia banned it outright for under-16s and enforced it in December. Indonesia followed in March, the first in Southeast Asia. Malaysia, Norway, Denmark, Spain, Slovenia are all mid-legislation toward some version of the same floor — an age below which an account simply cannot exist. In the United States, more than thirty states have introduced a law like it and fourteen have passed one. But almost none of those American laws are actually in force. California's is enjoined. Utah's is enjoined. Arkansas's is permanently blocked. Ohio's, Georgia's, Virginia's — struck down one after another, nearly always on the same ground France's Council just used: that a blanket age gate burdens the First Amendment rights of minors and adults alike, and that "protect children from addictive feeds" is a real interest but not, on its own, a narrow enough tool. Only Tennessee, Mississippi and Florida have actually gotten a version of the ban live past a federal court, and each of those survived by inches — a single circuit panel, a single denied stay, a Supreme Court refusal that came with a concurrence warning the challengers would probably win eventually anyway.
What makes France distinct isn't that it hesitated. Legislatures hesitate all the time — Colorado's governor vetoed a milder version of this same idea and got overridden and then watched the override die in the other chamber; New Hampshire's committee killed its bill 13-0 without a recorded reason beyond "inexpedient to legislate." What's different here is who did the stopping. In France it was the country's own constitutional court, reviewing a law before it could even reach enforcement, on the government's own initiative for review — not a private industry group suing after the fact, the way NetChoice has done in nearly every American case on this list. France built a bans-for-minors law with unusual political consensus (116-23 is not a fight) and its own court still said: not like this. Most of the countries racing toward this same floor right now have no comparable body positioned to ask the question before the ban is already live and already reshaping what a fifteen-year-old's Tuesday looks like.
The debate under all of this is old and has a name: is the harm of an algorithmic feed serious enough to justify treating expression itself as the thing being restricted, or is that framing already a category error — treating an app like a product with a warning label rather than like the reading room it also is. Every version of this law currently moving through a legislature somewhere is really an argument about where that line sits. France's answer today was: further from ourselves than the National Assembly drew it, even with that much agreement in the room.