On July 21, the French Parliament passed a ban on social media for anyone under the age of fifteen. This makes France the first country in the European Union to take this step. The ban itself consists of a single sentence added to the French Digital Economy Act of 2004: Children under the age of 15 are not permitted to access social media.
Exactly how this enforcement will work remains to be seen. The technical standard that platforms are expected to follow has not been published, the implementing regulation is incomplete, and the Conseil constitutionnel has yet to review the text. Macron has called the vote a milestone for child protection, the European Commission has welcomed it, and Spain, Denmark, and Greece are working on their own versions. Opinion in Europe is divided between those who see it as a legal framework that parents can finally rely on and those who expect it to merely shift the problem rather than solve it.
The Australian version has been in effect since December 10, 2025, with the age limit set at sixteen instead of fifteen, a designated regulatory authority, a monthly reporting requirement, and fines of up to 49.5 million Australian dollars. It is the best available forecast for France.
The initial figures seemed clear: In the first few weeks, platforms removed nearly five million accounts belonging to users under the age of 16. Subsequent research tells a different story. A team from the University of Newcastle tracked 408 young people before the law took effect and again three months later, finding that more than 85% of those under 16 continued to use the affected platforms, primarily through secondary accounts or private browsing. The Australian regulatory authority reached the same conclusion and launched compliance proceedings in March against Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube after it became apparent that a large proportion of children who had accounts prior to the ban continued to hold them afterward.
The same study contains the finding that directly answers the question. Daily social media use among 14- and 15-year-olds fell from 78% to 69%, a real but moderate decline. Among those over 16 , it rose from 80% to 89% during the same period, without any new factors emerging for this group that would explain the increase. These young people did not switch to a different platform, nor did they go offline. They simply moved up one age category in the data.
France is going further than Australia because it ultimately requires proof of age from every account, rather than simply requiring platforms to make reasonable efforts in the case of accounts that appear to belong to minors. Once this process has been completed for approximately forty million French accounts, according to a schedule set by each platform itself, using a verification method of its own choosing, the age distribution that a platform reports for a creator’s community will become a record of who has passed verification, rather than an estimate of who is watching.
This is the point that extends into marketing – not just the legal department. Creator selection, audience fit, brand safety, and campaign evaluation all rely on the demographic data reported by the platforms, and it is precisely this data that is currently being reshaped by a compliance process that is rolling out at different times on each platform.
The reported figures aren’t the only ones available and never have been. IROIN® by Stellar Tech shows you the audience behind a creator in detail—from age and gender distribution to fake followers and community authenticity, all the way to past brand collaborations and brand safety risks regardless of the platform. This ensures that the actual composition of a community is established before a contract is signed, rather than being inferred from a dashboard after the fact. The Fanblast case in February, as reported by , demonstrated just how quickly an overlooked risk in a creator’s environment can turn into a brand problem.
Timing matters more this year than ever before. A target audience profile collected in August serves as a baseline from before age verification began. This allows you to determine in February whether a target audience has shifted due to a compliance process or whether a creator never delivered what their numbers promised. Without this data, the two scenarios cannot be distinguished.
A purchase in this age group is thus a joint decision: one chooses, the other pays. Starting in September, only one of the two may legally hold an account in France – namely, the one with the card. The survey also reveals a perception gap within the household: 24% of children report placing orders independently via shopping apps, while only 19% of parents believe this to be the case.
Parent and family creators can reach this adult through an account that remains legal and verifiable in every market where this legislation is being implemented. Distinguishing a genuine parent community from one that only appears to be made up of adults on paper is the same data challenge as before. With IROIN®, you can find creators using over 45 filters based on the age, location, and interests of their target audience on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat, and Twitch—and clarify exactly that before sending out a brief.
For French creators with young communities, reach is likely to decline in the first quarter of 2027. Part of this decline will be genuine, while another part is due to verification friction, consumption while logged out, and newly reported birthdates, and from the outside, both look the same.
Since reporting is primarily based on reach and impressions, every French campaign during this period will appear to be a step backward, which is a reporting issue, not a performance issue. IROIN® automatically tracks your content across all platforms, monitors links and promo codes, analyses comments and sentiment, and consolidates everything into custom campaign dashboards – so a campaign that loses 15% of its reach but maintains its revenue can be shown for what it is: a more cost-effective campaign. This line of reasoning in February assumes that revenue tracking was already in place by August, and discussions about a brand typically shift before the dashboard registers them.
Young people aren’t going anywhere. That’s the conclusion drawn from the Australian data, and France has adopted a stricter version of the same principle. What the ban eliminates is not the young target audience but the ability to see them in the numbers reported by the platforms. This leads to four practical points.
None of this depends on whether the French law passes constitutional review, because the European direction has long been set. What sets apart the brands that come through this phase successfully is whether they knew who was in their target audiences before anyone was required to check.