Social media and minors: France bans, Belgium still debates

On 22 July, France voted to ban social media for under-15s, effective from the September school term. In Belgium, a similar measure has been in the works at federal level for months, but talks remain stuck. For any business targeting audiences on Meta, TikTok or Google in Belgium, here is what to watch.

1. What France just decided

On 22 July 2026, the French National Assembly voted to ban social media for minors under 15, with entry into force announced for September. Age verification falls largely on the platforms themselves, an approach several observers say still leaves open questions about its technical implementation.

2. Belgium, stuck between promise and deadlock

At home, federal Digital minister Vanessa Matz (Les Engagés) has been pushing a similar bill, with a threshold set at 15, which was meant to reach the Council of Ministers before 21 July. That deadline was missed: the file remains at the inter-cabinet discussion stage. The main sticking point is the age threshold itself. Flanders is pushing for a threshold of 13, with binding controls imposed directly on platforms, an approach the federal government considers insufficient. Talks will only resume after the summer, once the recommendations of the EU working group on online child safety, which also proposes a threshold of 13, have been reviewed.

3. Itsme and MyGov instead of an ID card

Unlike France, where age verification stays with the platforms, the Belgian approach favours a trusted third party, Itsme or MyGov. The stated goal is to avoid every user having to hand over an ID card or their face to social networks. The measure is far from a consensus, though: some experts call it largely symbolic, easy to bypass with a simple VPN, and point to the lack of an education component matched to the scale of the issue.

4. This debate is not (yet) about ad targeting

An important distinction: what is at stake here is access to the platforms themselves, not ad targeting. The latter is already regulated at EU level. Since the Digital Services Act came into force, Article 28 bans platforms from showing ads based on profiling of a user's personal data once they know with reasonable certainty that the user is a minor. GDPR, for its part, sets the age of consent for creating a profile at 13 in Belgium, the lowest threshold in Europe. A potential ban on social media access would therefore go further than these existing rules: it would remove certain audiences from the platforms altogether, rather than regulating how they are exposed to advertising on them.

5. What this already means for your campaigns

No obligation applies to Belgian advertisers yet. But the shift is under way across Europe: France is acting, the EU is recommending, Belgium is legislating at its own pace. For a business targeting young audiences on Meta, TikTok or Snapchat, three points deserve attention now: fine-grained demographic data on under-18s is likely to become more limited, platform age-verification mechanisms will keep changing without much notice, and budgets allocated to younger audience segments may need to be reworked depending on the markets targeted.

The AI lens, humans first

An AI agent can continuously monitor Meta, TikTok or Google ad policy announcements and flag any change to age-based targeting within 48 hours. That is a genuine time saver. But deciding how to redirect a media budget, or judging whether an audience needs rethinking in light of a new national rule, remains an expert's job, one who knows your market and your customers. AI executes. Expertise decides, and watches.