As France pauses social media ban, U.S. lawmakers race to restrict the internet

In a positive development for online freedom—which can feel rare these days—France’s top court has rejected a proposed social media ban, citing concerns over free expression and privacy. 

On Friday, France’s Constitutional Council ruled that a proposed social media ban for children under the age of 15 would “disproportionately infringe upon the freedom of expression and communication.” The court also found that the law failed to provide “the legal safeguards necessary to ensure the right to respect for private life,” Reuters reports. 

The bill, which would have also barred high school students from using phones in school, passed both chambers of France’s Parliament in July. The social media ban has been a longtime goal of French President Emmanuel Macron, who urged the European Union to pass similar legislation after a teenager stabbed a teacher’s assistant last June. He blamed teenagers’ exposure to social media for the violence. 

Even after last week’s legal setback, Macron appears determined to implement the ban. CNN reports that Macron has asked Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu to revise the bill “as quickly as possible.” 

In many ways, Europe and the U.K. still lead the U.S. in pushing for draconian online safety laws. But lawmakers in states such as Texas and Utah have passed similar legislation.

A judge in Travis County, Texas, was able to freeze the domain of a foreign pornography website in June because of the state’s age-verification laws for adult sites. As the internet freedom group Reclaim The Net points out, the site has been taken down “until it posts a $9.14 million bond and builds an age verification digital ID system to the state’s own specification.” While the ruling would force the company to comply with Texas law, it effectively took the site down “for everyone on earth,” the group notes.

Nico Perrino, executive vice president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), had called the situation “insane.” 

“The free internet is dead if a state court can pull a website offline worldwide simply because the registry for its domain is based in the United States,” he wrote on X. 

“That puts the world’s access to information at the mercy of state lawmakers and judges—in this case, in Texas,” he added. 

And it’s not just states that are cracking down on internet freedom—federal lawmakers are too. Earlier in August, the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee passed four bills related to online safety and AI, including the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which requires covered platforms to “implement tools and safeguards to protect users and visitors under the age of 17.” The Senate’s version of KOSA includes a “duty of care” provision regarding platforms’ design choices. Although the bill’s co-sponsor claims that the language would prevent sites from censoring or blocking content, FIRE has warned that design choices could be “broadly defined to include any feature of the platform that would cause minors to spend time on it.”

France’s court ruling is a win for internet freedom. But the push to censor and age-gate the internet does not appear to be stopping.