Social Media Ban: How I tried to see (a bit) more clearly
Laetitia Della Bianca
24.08.2026
In July 2026, the French Parliament passed a social media ban for under-15s, only for it to be struck down the following month by the Constitutional Council. Beneath the legal back-and-forth sits a messier disagreement that doesn’t split simply into “ban” vs. “no-ban” position.
On July 21, Macron announced a bill banning social media for under-15s in France. The law targeted all platforms (TikTok, Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram, Mastodon alike), but stayed silent on how the ban would actually be enforced. It was due to take effect on September 1st, which would have made France the first country in Europe to pass a ban like this.
Then, on August 14, France’s Constitutional Council struck it down as unconstitutional on the grounds that it restricted internet users’ freedom, regardless of age. Macron said the government would come back with a new version of the bill in spring 2027.
Beneath the question of whether the law will survive sits a deeper disagreement: who should have the power to decide what’s good for children and youth online, and on what basis? That disagreement is more complex than a pro-ban/anti-ban split.
Almost everyone agrees on this much: platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram have drifted far from what they first promised: spaces to connect with friends, family, and communities of shared interest. Somewhere along the way, their business models and design choices also started feeding addictive habits, enabling online harassment, and causing real suffering for many users. But that’s where the agreement ends. How people frame the problem, the words they use, and above all the measures they propose diverge drastically.
A quick, incomplete mapping of the positions in play
Over the past few days, I’ve been trying to make sense of this. France got a lot of attention, but it’s far from the only place this disagreement is playing out, including here in Switzerland. The more I read, the more tangled the debate seemed. So I remembered a technique I used to get unstuck (read more about that here). I mapped out the different positions, in Switzerland and beyond, on how to protect children and youth from social media’s harms. This is clearly incomplete, more like a sketch than an investigation. Here’s what I found:
Let the market regulate itself. Often championed by big social media companies, this position holds that platforms should govern themselves, and the state shouldn’t intervene. Behind it lies a fair amount of quiet work that involves downplaying how serious the problem is, distancing platforms from responsibility for what users post, and, when younger users do slip through, shifting the blame onto them for being there before the terms of use allow (usually age 13).
Ban it by law. This is the damage-control approach that currently manifests in legislative efforts in France, as well as Australia, China, and a growing number of countries: laws that forbid children and teenagers from accessing social media. It leans heavily on age-verification technology, and treats platform use as uniformly harmful, with little room for the idea that some uses might be fine, or even good. In Switzerland, this push is already on the table: three postulates were introduced in December 2024, twoaccepted at the national level, and one in Wallis. All three are still under consideration.
No smartphones at school. This position centers on screen time, calling for restrictions on phone use in schools. In Switzerland, many schools already have directives along these lines. Within this position, some argue rules should be decided at the school level, while others favor a uniform standard set by the cantons; some argue high schools should be included too.
Platforms should be regulated, not people. This position shifts the focus from user behavior to the platforms themselves, more specifically their design, business model, and technical architecture. Concretely, that means removing features built to keep people scrolling, demanding more transparency about how platforms work, and going after the mechanics that make harm scale, such as virality, targeted advertising, and the algorithms that decide what spread, how fast, and how far. It also recognizes social media as a necessary tool for democratic debate.
Young people should take part in those discussions and decisions. This position challenges the adultist framing of the debate by reclaiming youth as partners in shaping these decisions rather than passive victims to be acted upon. It’s gaining traction through youth-led movements calling for their needs and priorities to be taken into account.
Teach people the skills to be safe and thrive online. This position focuses on fostering digital literacy interventions in schools, libraries, and other third places. Such interventions are meant to reduce digital skills inequalities, by equipping kids, young people, and educators with the skills to understand, evaluate, and create information online.
Design new platforms. A smaller but growing position skips regulation altogether, calling for alternatives designed around wellbeing instead of engagement-driven metrics. New_ Public’s Prosocial Design Directory is a good resource for what that can look like in practice.
Financially support independent research on these issues. This position emphasizes funding empirical research and securing researchers’ access to platform data, for example through a Swiss Digital Media Observatory, to counterbalance the manufactured doubts of platform-owned research.
Overlaps, coalitions, and clashes
Although analytically distinct on paper, these positions aren’t mutually exclusive. They function as “puzzle pieces” in a broader strategy pursued by digital rights groups and official advisory bodies alike, recommending multimodal interventions. The Federal Commission for Children and Youth (CFEJ), for example, pairs three positions: promoting digital literacy, requiring legal transparency from platforms, and negotiating rules directly with young people. Similarly, Dezentrum and Risiko Dialog’s game Radical Choices bridges digital literacy with youth participation.
I also noticed that some positions were carried through alliances. The Swiss Internet Initiative, for example, unites consumer rights, education, mental health, and youth protection voices to demand that the burden of safety shifts from parents and children to the platforms’ owners. A similar consensus emerged last year: AlgorithmWatch CH Open letter to the Swiss Federal Council, calling for platform regulation, was co-signed by Dezentrum with 22 other organizations and more than 1,600 individuals. At the European level, in April 2026, 31 youth organizations across Europe, including the Swiss National Youth Council, as well as disability, queer and migrant youth networks, called for their inclusion in the debate, arguing that paternalist approaches excluding the people they claim to protect must end.
The ongoing state trials against Meta in the US are another example. For years, platforms were shielded from liability for harmful content. A recent shift in legal strategy is chipping away at that shield. Since lawyers can't challenge the content itself, they're targeting the software's addictive design instead. Framing platforms as a defective product opens the way for new regulation. In terms of the positions above, “let the market regulate itself” is losing ground to “platforms should be regulated, not people.”
The French bill may be the clearest test of where this all lands. Macron says his government will come back with a new version in spring 2027. The open question is whether that version will fit the "Ban it by law" position or move toward regulating platform design instead.
But whatever happens with the French bill, those arguments don't seem to be changing many minds among the policymakers pushing this policy forward. Positions promoting age verification seem to remain strikingly immune to these arguments; if anything, I have the impression that they're gaining ground, pushed forward by a fast-growing AI age-verification industry with its own stake in the outcome. Social media and AI companies themselves are increasingly among those lobbying for age verification, although through app stores rather than legislation.
Sorting out my own position
Trying the positioning exercise for myself…
As a researcher, it's hard to watch states push so hard for a ban when the evidence (in Australia, for instance) shows such an exclusionary measure doesn’t even reduce access.
As a social media user, my nerves are already boiling every time I’m blocked from a music video unless I verify my age with my ID or a selfie. (No, Google, I won’t feed this mass-data-collection infrastructure.)
As an aunt, a godmother, and someone who’d like to be a trusted adult, I worry about how big platforms capture attention and shape people’s brains. But I want no part of measures that treat children and teens as only fragile, incapable people to be managed or excluded, that put a whole range of technologies into one single “toxic” category, or that isolate kids as the problem, when the harms (and benefits) can touch us all.
As someone who believes in participatory approaches –to research and to life– I’m drawn to youth-led initiatives. They should, at the very least, be consulted; more than that, they should be co-leading interventions, as they’re the ones who can help shape solutions that hold up in practice.
What do you think?
Having mapped my own overlapping position, I’ll turn the question to you: does any of this align with where you stand? Where would you situate yourself, and why? Which position is missing?
