French President Emmanuel Macron said he wants his government to speed up the legal process to impose a social media ban on children under 15 before the start of the next school year in September.
“The brains of our children and adolescents are not for sale,” Macron said in a video posted by French channel CNN BFMTV. “Their emotions are not for sale and cannot be manipulated, whether by American platforms or Chinese algorithms.” “We are banning social networks for children under 15 years old and we will ban mobile phones in our high schools. I believe that this is a clear regulation – easy to understand for our teenagers, families, teachers,” the head of the Fifth Republic emphasized.
CNN notes that a growing number of Western countries are looking to pass sweeping legislation to protect young people from the potential harms of social media, following the passage of Australia's landmark law in December banning people under 16 from having accounts on certain social media platforms.
Mr. Macron's announcement came days after the British government said it was also considering a series of measures to ensure children's safety online, including a ban on children under 16 years old using social networks.
Macron's glasses caused a stir on the manufacturer's website
In France, this ban was initiated by Laure Miller, a deputy of Macron's Renaissance party. In an interview with a television channel affiliated with the French parliament, Miller asserted that the government needed to act because “currently there is no age verification process at all.”
“You can enter any date of birth and access the platform. What we want to force on the platform, while strictly complying with the European Digital Services Act (DSA), is proof of actual age when logging into the social network. This changes everything because users will actually have to prove whether they are over or under 15 years old,” she said.
While conceding that “there will always be ways” to get around the restrictions, the politician argued that France “should at least intervene when it comes to protecting minors online”.
Last month, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said more than 4.7 million social media accounts believed to belong to people under the age of 16 had been disabled or deleted since the country's ban.
At the time, Albanese told CNN that his government introduced the ban because “we know it harms society and so, as a government, we have a responsibility to respond to the pleas of parents, as well as the ‘let us be children’ campaign of young people.”
Before the ban, Albanese appealed to Australian teenagers in a video, urging them to “take up a new sport, learn a new musical instrument or read that book that has been on your shelf for a long time”.
Elon Musk, owner of social network However, platform X is complying with the measures taken, CNN points out.
The impetus for Australia's ban was a book by American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, published in 2024. When the wife of South Australian Prime Minister Peter Malinauskas read the book Generation Trouble, which argued that social media was destroying children's mental health, she began reciting its contents to her husband every evening.
“You better do something about this,” she told Malinauskas, who soon introduced a draft bill for possible statewide solutions that later became a federal campaign.
“The book's core argument is that we are overprotecting our children in the real world and underprotecting them online. We are wrong on both counts.” Jonathan Haidt told CNN about this in 2024. As a solution, the book proposed a ban on smartphone use in schools and social networks for children under 16 years old.
