Banning social media for under-15s

The law banning social media for minors under 15 was passed by France’s National Assembly on the night of January 26–27, 2026. Rather than simply deploring it, I propose here to understand it as a symptom — that of adult domination — and to draw the consequences in order to invent, together, new paths forward.

Two blind spots in the public debate

Serge Tisseron, psychiatrist and member of the French Academy of Technologies, identified in his op-ed in Le Monde on January 7, 2026, and later on his blog, two major blind spots in this law. The first concerns digital education: children kept away from social media until the age of 15 risk discovering them later in an equally problematic way, with no preparation whatsoever, especially since the Ministry of National Education remains silent on the matter. The second concerns the absence of measures regarding alternatives to screens: adolescents need to meet one another, to forge bonds with peers outside the family circle, and this law provides nothing to offer them physical spaces for socialisation to compensate for those being taken away.

I deeply share these analyses. But I would like to go further, to clarify my thinking, and above all to suggest constructive approaches for dealing with the situation as it now stands. This law has been passed; we have to take it into account. I am not writing against Serge Tisseron — we are close, we trust each other, even when we disagree. It is rather to extend the reflection where it seems to me it needs extending.

Adult domination, or the belief that being in power makes you right

Let us begin with the first blind spot, the absence of digital education. This observation actually points to something far deeper than a mere legislative oversight. It reveals something that needs to be named: adult domination.

This law was passed by 130 votes to 21, under fast-track procedure. Almost all political parties represented in the Assembly supported it, with the exception of La France insoumise and two Green MPs. In other words, adults in positions of power decided on behalf of young people on a subject they do not know, do not experience, do not understand, and do not even want to try to understand. Adults who, for the most part, are thoroughly incompetent on the subject of social media, because their own digital experience is limited, superficial, and most often devoid of any critical self-reflection — that is, of any questioning of their own practices.

Yves Bonnardel, in his book La domination adulte : l’oppression des mineurs [Adult Domination: The Oppression of Minors] (2015, éditions Le Hêtre Myriadis, preface by Christine Delphy), carried out thorough historical and sociological research on this question. He shows that adult domination is a manifestation of ageism — discrimination based on age — which structures our societies. Children are deemed particularly vulnerable and, under this pretext, are assigned a “minority” status that strips them of the rights enjoyed by adults. This status in fact sanctions various forms of subjection, and therefore of violence. Bonnardel demonstrates that the family and the school are among the privileged sites for the exercise of this adult order, and that the very notion of “child protection” often serves as a cover for a system of control from which children are the first to suffer. What Bonnardel calls “adultism” operates in exactly the same way as other systems of domination: it presents itself as natural, self-evident, incontestable, and its victims have virtually no power to challenge it, except through disobedience — which can bring terrible punishments.

This law is an almost caricatural example. For here is the paradox that nobody wants to see: it is precisely adults who are the most vulnerable on social media. A study published in the journal RESET (Recherches en sciences sociales sur Internet) shows that teenagers are better than adults at using online privacy protection tools. Far from irreversibly exposing their intimacy, young people engage in a strategic management of their social capital, where the boundary between private and public is thought through, negotiated, and constantly readjusted. The recent survey conducted by the CNIL (France’s data protection authority) by Mehdi Arfaoui and Jennifer Elbaz in 2025, Numérique adolescent et vie privée [Adolescent Digital Life and Privacy], based on 130 interviews with secondary school students and 600 questionnaires with parents, confirms this finding: young people’s appropriation of digital tools is progressive, negotiated with parents, and far removed from the moral panics that dominate public debate.

Adults, on the other hand, far more often let themselves be manipulated by attention-capture mechanisms, accept terms of use without reading them, share their personal data indiscriminately, sometimes put the organisations they work for at risk through their chaotic use of AI or Microsoft tools, manage their passwords deplorably, fall into the traps of disinformation, and are the primary victims of online scams. This is not because they are “stupid” — it is simply because they are less equipped: they did not grow up in these environments, they understand very poorly their codes, their mechanisms, and the subtle economies of visibility and attention. And so, through a classic psychological mechanism, they project their own incomprehension onto the young. This is a well-known phenomenon in psychoanalysis: projection, which consists of attributing to the other what belongs to us, and in particular our own difficulties. Adults, overwhelmed by a digital world they do not master and that puts them in difficulty, project this fear and this incompetence onto young people, turned into designated victims of a danger to which adults are in fact the most exposed — and in relation to which young people could actually help them. The ultimate paradox.

This does not mean that children and adolescents do not need support. Of course they do. But support, not prohibition. Because this kind of ban will inevitably be circumvented — several MPs themselves acknowledged this during the Assembly debates. It is exactly the mechanism of Prohibition in the United States at the beginning of the 20^th century: banning legitimate practices does not make them disappear, it drives them underground. You cannot suppress an anthropological need with an article of law. You push it into the shadows, and in the shadows, it escapes all supervision, all support, all dialogue.

It is telling that one of the most pertinent voices in this parliamentary debate was that of Louis Boyard, the young LFI MP from Val-de-Marne, born in 2000 and who knows these realities from the inside. He denounced a law for show, whose actual enforcement remains uncertain, pointing out that its promoters do not even know who will be responsible for applying it, and that instead of supporting young people, 400 school psychologist positions have been cut in the national education system. He also warned about the security drift of the system: this law opens up the possibility of identity verification for everyone, regardless of age, across all social media. His closeness to the lived experience of young people gives him a knowledge that most other MPs simply do not have. And this is precisely where the question of adult domination plays out: those who know are not listened to, precisely because they are young.

This law as a symptom: an analysis

I would like to propose that we look at this law not merely as a political mistake, but as a symptom. The word is worth pausing over, because it is precisely what allows us to understand the deep logic at work.

In psychoanalysis, a symptom is never what it appears to be. It is a compromise between a desire and a defence, a formation that expresses in a roundabout way what the subject cannot formulate directly. Freud showed that the symptom is at once suffering and an attempt at cure: it signals a psychic conflict while attempting to resolve it, in a maladaptive way. Applied to the social field, this reading is illuminating. This law is a collective symptom. The desire is to protect children — a legitimate intention that no one disputes. But the defence reveals something else: the need to control what one does not understand, to reassert a power that falters in the face of a world that is slipping away.

In ethnology, we find an analogous mechanism in what anthropologists call purification rites. When a community feels threatened by an element it does not understand, it designates an object to exclude, a scapegoat, and the ritual of exclusion symbolically restores the threatened order. Here, social media play the role of the impure object, and the ban functions as a rite of exclusion: by banishing them for under-15s, adult society reassures itself, purifies itself, restores a sense of control. But reality does not let itself be conjured away by ritual.

From a sociological standpoint, Pierre Bourdieu can help us understand this dynamic. In his theory of symbolic violence, he shows that the most effective domination is that which gets itself recognised as legitimate by those very people who endure it. The near-unanimous vote in the Assembly is testimony to this: it is not a small group imposing its will, it is a widely shared belief crystallising into law, without anyone taking the time to examine its presuppositions. Hannah Arendt, in her analyses of totalitarianism, drew a precise distinction between dictatorship and totalitarianism on this very point: in totalitarianism, domination is not merely imposed from above, it is internalised by the majority. This is the mechanism we observe here: many people sincerely believe this ban is a good thing. The symptom passes itself off as the remedy.

This mechanism of adult domination is part of a long history, moreover. Hesiod, around 720 BCE, was already deploring an unbearable youth. As Paulo Freire reminds us in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), every authoritarian pedagogical relationship reproduces patterns of domination where the knower maintains the ignorant in their subordinate position in order to preserve their own status. Jacques Rancière, in The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1987), showed how intellectual emancipation requires breaking with this logic of the inequality of intelligences. And this domination is deeply connected to the other systems of domination that our societies perpetuate: patriarchal domination, hierarchical domination in businesses, the domination of those who know over those who do not — even though the self-proclaimed knowers are often those who know the least. What this law reveals is a society of control rather than trust, a society of power and permission rather than freedom and emancipation.

The denial of reality: when adults ban what they themselves live

The second blind spot of the debate, the question of encounter, also deserves deeper examination. For there is in this law a dimension of denial that is truly dizzying.

These same adults who vote to ban social media for young people are themselves building a considerable part of their emotional lives through digital means. Platforms like Tinder are not places for fleeting encounters: they are spaces where adults truly meet each other, build lasting relationships, start families. The French-founded app Happn even proposes reconnecting with people you have crossed paths with in real life. Couples form, children are born from relationships that began on a screen. Digital technology has become a fundamental space for human encounter, including in its most intimate and vital dimensions. And physical spaces for meeting are becoming scarcer.

But here is the denial: these adults consider that the reality they live, that they embody in their own practices, has nothing to do with their children’s reality. As if digital technology were dangerous for young people but perfectly harmless for them. As if the mechanisms of attention capture, algorithmic manipulation, and data collection did not concern them. It is magical thinking, where the boundary of age alone would suffice to transform a dangerous space into a harmless one.

The very modalities of encounter are changing. The anthropological ways of taking a risk with another person, of entering into relationship, of building trust, are being profoundly transformed. This is neither good nor bad — it is reality. And to legislate while ignoring reality is to manufacture powerlessness.

The hypocrisy of a law that claims to provide a framework by destroying it

It is precisely for this reason that this law will produce the opposite of what it promises. It presents itself as a framework, but in reality it destroys any possible framework. Not only because it strips parents of part of their educational prerogatives, but above all because it draws a veil over what is going to happen. As if banning were the same as making something disappear. We ban it, therefore it no longer exists. No need to support, no need to educate, no need to understand. It is the logic of denial elevated to public policy.

Young people will widely resort to VPNs to circumvent the ban, finding themselves alone in their digital experiences, with no support whatsoever. Others risk retreating into AI-generated virtual companions, even more desocialising. The law will thus have manufactured a new underground Internet space — a space necessary to young people’s lives but henceforth removed from all observation, all conversation, all guidance. This is the very principle of prohibition: you criminalise a practice, you do not make it disappear, and in doing so you make it all the more dangerous, because it is now beyond any framework.

And I remember very well, in my childhood, in the 1970s, there were obviously no social media, no Internet. But there was terrible violence in adolescent spaces. Physical violence, drugs, rape, painful experiences — and adults drew a veil over it. There was almost no possibility of help from adults, and when it existed, it was most often misunderstood, badly handled. What we are doing today with this law is exactly the same thing: we are once again placing a barrier between adults and young people. We are manufacturing silence where dialogue is needed. We are abandoning young people, isolating them in a fate whose existence we pretend to deny.

The framework is what empowers: an alternative to prohibition

This is where I would like to develop a concept that is dear to me and that sheds light, I believe, on the impasse in which this law places us. That concept is the framework.

A framework, as I understand it and as my experience as an educator and filmmaker has taught me, is not what prohibits. It is what empowers. A genuine framework is not to be confused with a set of rules imposed from outside. Often, in education, the framework is associated with a disciplinary notion: one must “frame” unruly students to obtain silence, children must be docile so that adults can accomplish their educational mission. But if this “respect for the framework” is obtained by force, by threat, by the prohibition of self-expression, one may well obtain silent students, but who within themselves are anxious, uneasy, vigilant not to step out of line so as not to be reprimanded. This is what I call a “false framework,” by analogy with the notions of “true self” and “false self” developed by Donald Winnicott.

Neuroscience confirms this clinical intuition. Well-being, trust, and positive emotions trigger the synthesis of neurotransmitters such as serotonin, which activate the capacity of neurons to create new connections — that is, to learn. Conversely, fear and anxiety block this synthesis: the brain then devotes its resources to vital protection functions, powerfully inhibiting learning capacities. A framework based on prohibition and threat is therefore, in the most physiological sense of the term, antithetical to learning. This is exactly what research on Ordinary Educational Violence (VEO), carried out notably by Alice Miller and then Olivier Maurel, has demonstrated.

A “true framework” is something else entirely. It is the emotional and psychological state of the people involved: the fact that they feel reassured, confident, joyful, motivated, in empathy with one another. It is from this inner state that everything becomes possible. Like the warm-up in a dance class, which precedes and makes possible the activity itself, the true framework is a psychological prerequisite, not a disciplinary corset. It cannot be bought ready-made: it is built, patiently, with the people concerned. As Bernard Stiegler writes in Prendre soin [Taking Care] (2008), the capacity for attention is closely linked to the feeling of trust and cognitive freedom. Cognitive resistance, the capacity to resist one’s reflexive thinking developed by the psychologist Olivier Houdé, can only unfold in an environment of trust, without fear of judgment.

And to build this framework, there is a remarkable tool, drawn from psychoanalysis, that I use in my pedagogical practice: the symbolic third. In psychoanalysis, to be a subject is to be the subject of one’s desire — the desire to live, to learn, to create. This stands in opposition to being an object, that is, manipulated by the other, even “for our own good.” When two people are in a dual relationship, without mediation, each projects onto the other their emotions, their assumptions, their fears: it is an object-relation, a relation of power. Genuine connection is then impossible. However, if a third object is placed between them — a work to create, a film to make, a project to build, a tool to explore — the projections settle on this third object, and the relationship between the two subjects can then emerge. This is the very definition of the symbolic function: enabling encounter through the mediation of a shared object.

Teachers’ accounts after Arts and Cultural Education workshops constantly illustrate this: “It’s incredible — thanks to your activity, I discovered this student in a completely different way!” The creative object played the role of a symbolic third, making it possible to refound a relationship beyond the previous duality. Digital technology could fulfil exactly this role: a space of shared creation between adults and young people, a third that enables encounter rather than surveillance. But for that, the adult must agree to let go of power, to trust, to give the tool fully to the other.

A framework that prohibits is something that constrains the human, that constrains their contributions — that is to say, that puts a brake on democratic possibilities. It is a brake not only on cultural democracy, but on democracy itself. For democracy presupposes the active participation of all in collective life, including young people. And this is precisely what this law takes away from them.

These digital spaces, rather than being banned, must be regulated among peers, in trust and mutual enrichment. Trust is what must be built to found a genuine framework. And this trust is built through listening: listening to young people, recognising them as people endowed with a culture and competences, giving them a full place in the reflection on the practices that concern them. This weaves bonds that foster trust, and therefore the risk-taking of self-expression. When the framework of a project proves inadequate, one must have the courage to transgress it in order to remain faithful to the fundamental objectives, which are of the order of process, of experience, as John Dewey showed in Art as Experience (1934). The framework must empower through openings to the possible, not imprison within impossibilities.

Dealing with it: understanding rather than fighting

The question that now arises is no longer one of criticism. The law has been passed, and it could come into force as early as the start of the 2026 school year. We must take into account the fact that adults in positions of power have made this choice, and that this choice reveals a system of domination that it would be futile to fight head-on. The question becomes: how do we deal with it?

I believe we must, first, feel sorrow for those who are doing this. Yes, they are people in positions of power. Yes, they judge us, stigmatise us, perhaps criminalise us. But they are acting from a fear that it is up to us to understand rather than to despise.

We have already lived through this. Covid was that period of generalised surveillance, of stigmatisation, of institutionalised distrust based on false and manipulated official information, when it was necessary to resist, to come together, to create groups for alternative thinking. We learned something from that ordeal: it is in the moments when institutions malfunction that we most need to invent civic spaces.

And this is precisely what we can do today. Create democratic spaces within civil society. Spaces where people think differently, exchange, reassure one another. Spaces where young people and adults truly meet, in trust and in listening, and not in suspicion and control.

Another digital world is possible

Digital technology, precisely, offers us the tools for this — provided we know which digital world we are talking about. For there are two radically different digital worlds, and the confusion between them is at the heart of the problem. On one side, the digital world of the tech giants — Google, Apple, Facebook (Meta), Amazon, Microsoft — and their emulators like TikTok: a digital world founded on attention capture, personal data extraction, algorithmic manipulation, targeted advertising. Nobody defends that digital world. It is legitimately open to criticism, and young people, like adults, deserve to be protected from it through the building of critical thinking, because we cannot escape it.

But on the other side exists a digital world that the general public knows poorly: that of free software and decentralised networks. The free software movement, initiated in the 1980s by Richard Stallman, rests on a fundamental principle: the source code of software is open, consultable, modifiable by all. This is not merely a technical question — it is a political one. Free software is software that its users control, not the other way around. In France, the association Framasoft, a popular education organisation dedicated to ethical digital technology, has developed a whole ecosystem of free alternatives to Big Tech services. Mastodon replaces Twitter/X with a decentralised network, without advertising, where each community defines its own moderation rules. PeerTube offers an alternative to YouTube, where videos are hosted in a distributed manner, with no recommendation algorithm or advertising tracking. Diaspora offers an alternative to Facebook. PixelFed, an alternative to Instagram. The principle is always the same: decentralisation, respect for personal data, transparency of operation, and the absence of a business model founded on the exploitation of attention.

These tools exist, they work, and they already bring together millions of users. They prove that another digital world is possible: a digital world of emancipation and contribution, not of capture and extraction. The ban makes no distinction between these two digital worlds. It prohibits social media for young people as a whole, equating a free and ethical community forum with an attention-capture platform. It is as if all food were banned on the grounds that junk food exists.

Yes, some uses of these free networks will probably be illegal under the new law. But legality has never been the sole criterion of legitimacy. The history of our Republic demonstrates this forcefully.

Inventing new institutions

On June 17, 1789, the deputies of the Third Estate, representing what the Abbé Sieyès called “ninety-six hundredths of the nation,” constituted themselves as a National Assembly, without the king’s authorisation. This act was in itself illegal under the law of the Ancien Régime. Louis XVI then had the Salle des Menus-Plaisirs, where they were meeting, closed. On June 20, refusing to yield, the deputies gathered in the Jeu de Paume hall in Versailles and took a solemn oath never to separate until they had given the kingdom a Constitution. The text of the oath affirms it with magnificent radicality: “wherever its members are assembled, there is the National Assembly.” Faced with the king’s envoy who wanted to disperse them, Mirabeau replied that only the force of bayonets could dislodge them. On July 9, the Assembly declared itself a Constituent Assembly. On August 4, it abolished the privileges. On August 26, it adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

These institutions did not exist. They were supported by no legal framework. They were even opposed by the power in place. And yet it is they that found our Republic today. What these citizens did was invent new institutions where the old ones had become inoperative, create new law where existing law had become an instrument of domination.

In the same way, it falls to us to invent, through digital technology, new institutions — that is to say, new ways of being together, new forms of democracy, connected to contemporary reality. We can clearly see that the old institutions are inoperative, out of touch with reality, and that they perpetuate what causes harm. Our power to act is there, in these new places.

This is a gentle commitment, not an exhausting one, carried by sharing and collective intelligence. Laws are not created solely by the elected representatives of the Republic. We can be actors in this process, each in our own way, by sharing, exchanging, writing, committing ourselves. That is what I am doing by writing this article. That is what I do in all the work I carry out with young people, educators, parents, and teachers in cultural organisations. These different ways of being together, of thinking and creating the conditions for a more just world: that is what it means to create new laws. And many of us can do this, gently, in mutual respect for the dignity of the other.