A cross-party committee in France’s Parliament approved a compromise bill on Monday that would bar children under 15 from social media, pushing one of Europe’s most far-reaching online-safety measures towards a final vote before lawmakers break for summer.

The text now returns to both chambers this week, echoing Australia’s under-16 ban and a broader European drift towards keeping younger teenagers off the major platforms.

The joint committee, which paired seven members of the National Assembly with seven senators, settled a dispute that had dragged on for months over how far the ban should stretch and which services it should catch.

Its deal clears the way for votes as early as Tuesday, part of a rush that mirrors EU lawmakers weighing a bloc-wide age limit.

The 💜 of EU tech

The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!

The bill would block access to Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube for anyone under 15, and would oblige platforms to run age-verification systems vetted by France’s privacy regulator.

It would also ban smartphones in high schools, widening a prohibition already applied to younger pupils.

The main sticking point had been scope. The National Assembly wanted a blanket ban on all social networking services, while the Senate pushed for a narrower blacklist, and according to reports the committee ultimately sided with the Assembly’s wider approach.

Under the compromise, the government’s digital minister would draw up the official list of services covered, with exemptions carved out for online encyclopedias, educational and scientific directories, and open-source software platforms.

The age-verification methods, the thorniest part of any such law, were not spelled out in detail.

Timing is tight. Lawmakers aim to finish voting before the summer recess, though the measure reportedly cannot take effect before 10 August, when a mandatory EU notification period ends.

That leaves a narrow corridor between the final vote and the autumn term, and any slippage in either chamber could push the timetable past the school year that Macron is targeting.

President Emmanuel Macron has thrown his weight behind the ban and wants it running by the start of the school year in September.

His office has cast it as potentially one of the last major reforms of his presidency, which ends next year.

“Banning social media for those under 15: this is what scientists recommend, and this is what the French people are overwhelmingly calling for,” Macron said earlier this year, when the National Assembly first passed the text by 130 votes to 21.

He added that children’s brains were “not for sale, neither to American platforms nor to Chinese networks”.

Not everyone in Parliament is convinced. When the Assembly first backed the text in January, hard-left lawmakers attacked parts of it as an infringement of civil liberties, and unease about how the state would police access without sweeping up adult users has trailed the bill ever since.

The proposal has not been free of friction with Brussels either. The European Commission earlier found the draft not fully compatible with EU law, citing overlap with the Digital Services Act, which prompted French lawmakers to amend it before this week’s vote.

France would not be acting alone. Australia switched on the world’s first under-16 ban in December, covering the same crop of platforms, though early trials of its age checks have already shown how easily such systems can be gamed.

Momentum is building across the rest of Europe. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has voiced support for bloc-wide limits on children’s access, and the EU has been readying its own age-verification app, even as privacy campaigners warn that reliable, low-intrusion checks remain elusive.

For now, the French bill is still a proposal rather than law. It must clear both chambers, survive the EU notification window, and answer the question every comparable effort has stumbled over, which is how to tell a 14-year-old from a 15-year-old without hoovering up the personal data of everyone else.