Banning social media for teens? My 15-year-old self is not really on board

Published on 15 August 2026

So the Constitutional Council struck down the ban on social media for under-15s on Friday, the one that was supposed to take effect on September 1st. A lot of people are furious, and I get it. But a part of me, the oldest part, is a little relieved, and I'm going to tell you why.

As a kid, I was painfully shy. Unable to talk to strangers, unable to build a single friendship on my own: my only pals were the ones who had picked me, I never picked any myself. School terrified me and I was, frankly, a miserable kid. Thank goodness video games were there to help me hold on. Yes, video games, the ones that also get blamed for every evil in the world on a regular basis.

And then the Internet arrived.

I spent entire nights on IRC, on Infonie's Talkie, on ICQ and then MSN, talking with people who saw neither my shyness nor my hang-ups. That's where I started to exist a little, to think about who I wanted to be and what I wanted to tell others. My best friends come from those nights. A good chunk of my culture and my skills too.

And yes, I was exactly 15-16, the very age the law wanted to set as the floor. Would starting earlier have damaged me? Honestly, I have no idea. But I know what those spaces repaired in me, and the idea of bans strikes me as pretty risky.

"Sure, but TikTok in 2026 has nothing to do with your IRC from back then." Fair enough. But honestly, my 8 hours a night on IRC weren't much more productive than 8 hours of TikTok today. We still weren't fixing the world, and most of the time it was just hours of insulting each other, teasing each other and talking nonsense.

Now, I'm not naive either: the infinite scroll is probably a real problem. So are the algorithms built to get you hooked, and the nonexistent moderation ruins plenty of spaces that could be good ones. Let's go after that first. Especially since the Council also struck down the age verification, which came with zero privacy guarantees. Besides, in Australia, where under-16s have been banned since late 2025, teens are getting around the block with VPNs and accounts borrowed from big brothers, and it's massive.

And what better thing are we offering these kids anyway? Going on vacation has become a luxury. TV doesn't make much for them anymore, creative output loops on remakes designed for their parents' nostalgia. We blame them for scrolling in a world that doesn't open many other doors for them.

Meanwhile, Arcom measured in July that more than two-thirds of 10-14 year-olds were in favor of their own ban. Kids who are asking for the thing to be confiscated from them, that's really something. Even they can feel the machine is broken. But an age sign at the entrance won't fix it. The real work, for me, is building something else, and Europe could, for instance, work on offering safer, more diverse social networks, without algorithms, properly moderated, fit to welcome adults in the making, where TikTok and X no longer protect anyone at all.

By Paingout