French President Emmanuel Macron said he wants the government to speed up the legal process to ensure the ban on social media use for children under 15 is enforced 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 released by CNN’s French affiliate BFMTV late Saturday. “Their emotions are not for sale and cannot be manipulated, whether on American platforms or Chinese algorithms.”
“We will ban social media for under-15s and we will ban the use of mobile phones in high schools. I believe these are clear rules. Clear for teenagers, clear for families, clear for teachers,” he stressed.
Australia’s December enactment of landmark legislation banning anyone under the age of 16 from having an account on platforms such as Instagram, TikTok and Facebook has led a growing number of Western countries to call for comprehensive legislation to protect young people from the potential harms of social media.
Macron’s announcement came just days after the UK government announced it was considering a range of measures aimed at keeping children safe online, including banning social media use for under-16s.
France’s ban is being spearheaded by Laure Miller, a lawmaker from Macron’s Renaissance party. Miller said in an interview with French Parliament TV that the government needed to take action because “at the moment there is no age verification at all”.
“You can enter any date of birth to access the platform. What we want to impose on platforms, by strictly enforcing the European Digital Services Act (DSA), is real-age verification when accessing social networks. This changes everything because users have to prove that they are actually over or under 15,” she said.
He acknowledged that “there are always ways” to circumvent restrictions, but said France “should at least be proactive when it comes to protecting minors online.”
In response to Australia’s ban, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced last month that social media accounts of 4.7 or above, which are deemed to be owned by under-16s, have been disabled or deleted.
Message from Albanese to teenagers
Message from Albanese to teenagers
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At the time, Albanese told CNN that the government imposed the ban because “we know there is a social harm being caused, and we have a responsibility as a government to respond to the pleas of parents and to respond to the young people’s movement to remain children.”
On the eve of the ban, Ms Albanese spoke in a video to Australian teenagers, urging them to “take up a new sport, learn a new instrument or read that book that has been sitting on your bookshelf for a while.”
X Company owner Elon Musk has spoken out against the 2024 ban, saying the proposal “looks like a backdoor war to control access to the internet for all Australians”. However, X complied with this measure.
The ban in Australia was triggered by a book by American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt published in 2024. When the wife of South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas read ‘Anxious Generation’, which claims social media is undermining children’s mental health, she started giving her husband a summary of the book every night. “We better seriously do something about this,” she told Malinauskas. Mr. Malinauskas immediately commissioned legislation on potential solutions in the state, which later became a federal campaign.
“The basic thesis of this book is that we’ve overprotected our children in the real world and underprotected them online. We’ve been wrong on both counts,” Hite told CNN in 2024. As a solution, the book suggests banning smartphones and social media for under-16s in schools.
