France moves to ban Snapchat, TikTok and Instagram for under-15s in landmark social media law

France is set to follow Australia’s lead in prohibiting social media access to younger teenagers as deliberations on a new law commence in the National Assembly.

The proposed legislation would restrict access to platforms such as Snapchat, Instagram, and Tiktok for individuals under 15 years of age.

President Emmanuel Macron has expressed his desire to implement the ban by the start of the school year in September.

This move is part of a global trend aimed at limiting social network access for children, driven by increasing evidence of the detrimental impact on mental health.

“We cannot entrust the mental and emotional well-being of our children to entities whose primary objective is to profit from them,” Macron stated last month.

Under the new legislation, the state media regulator would compile a list of social media networks deemed harmful, which would be prohibited for individuals under 15 years of age.

A separate list of supposedly less harmful sites would be accessible, but only with explicit parental approval.

The bill is believed to have a good chance of passing, with pro-Macron parties likely to be joined by the centre-right Republicans (LR) as well as the populist right-wing National Rally (RN).

Another clause would ban the use of mobile telephones in senior schools (lycées). The ban is already in effect in junior and middle schools.

If the law is passed, France will need to agree on the mechanism for for age-verification. A system is already in place that requires over 18 year-olds to prove their age when accessing online pornography.

In Europe, Denmark, Greece, Spain and Ireland are also considering following the Australian example. Earlier this month, the UK government launched a consultation on banning social media for under 16s.

The basis of the proposed French law is a text drawn up late last year by deputy Laure Miller, who chaired a parliamentary committee enquiry into the psychological effects of TikTok and other networks.
Separately, the government was told to draw up its own legislation, after Macron decided to make the issue a centrepiece of his last year in office.

The president has been sidelined from domestic politics since the Assembly elections which he called in 2024 resulted in a hung parliament, and the social media ban has been a rare chance to court public favour.

For a time the cause risked falling victim to bickering between Macron and his one-time prime minister Gabriel Attal (Miller is an MP from Attal’s party). But in the end the government appears to have rallied behind the Miller bill.

If the text is approved Monday, it will pass before the upper house, the Senate, in the next month. Macron said he had asked the government of Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu to use a fast-track procedure to get the legislation on the books by September.

Without resort to the fast-track (which permits a single reading as opposed to two in each of the two houses), the law would have little chance of getting past the legislative backlog created by Lecornu’s difficulties in passing a budget.

The bill has already had to be redrafted to take account of questions raised by the Council of State, the body which previews draft legislation to ensure it conforms with French and European law.

A 2023 law which proposed a similar ban on social media for young teenagers proved inoperable after courts decided it broke European law.

Source: BBC