France is on course to follow Australia in banning social media to younger teenagers, as debate on a new law opens in the National Assembly.
The law would block access for under 15-year-olds to networks such as Snapchat, Instagram and Tiktok.
President Emmanuel Macron has said he wants the ban in place by the start of the school year in September.
The French move is part of a worldwide trend towards restricting social networks for children, triggered by growing evidence of the damage they can cause to mental health.
“We cannot leave the mental and emotional health of our children in the hands of people whose sole purpose is to make money out of them,” Macron said last month.
Under the new text, the state media regulator would draw up a list of social media networks that are deemed harmful. These would be simply banned for under 15-year-olds.
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.
By BBC News
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