French President Emmanuel Macron said he wants his government to fast-track the legal process to ensure that a ban on social media use for children under the age of 15 can be in place 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 late Saturday by CNN’s French affiliate BFMTV. “Their emotions are not for sale or to be manipulated, whether by American platforms or Chinese algorithms.”

“We are banning social media for under-15s and we are going to ban mobile phones in our high schools. I believe this is a clear rule – clear for our teenagers, clear for families, clear for teachers,” he stressed.

A growing number of Western countries are seeking to enact sweeping legislation to safeguard young people from the potential harms of social media, following Australia’s landmark law in December that bans under 16s from having accounts on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and other platforms.

Macron’s announcement came days after the British government said it is considering a range of measures aiming to keep children safe online, including banning the use of social media for under-16s.

The French ban is being spearheaded by Laure Miller, a lawmaker from Macron’s Renaissance party. In an interview with the television channel associated with the French parliament, Miller said the government needed to take action because “right now, there is no age verification whatsoever.”

“You can enter any date of birth and access the platform. What we want to impose on platforms, by strictly enforcing the European Digital Services Act (DSA), is real age verification when you access a social network. That changes everything, because users will actually have to prove whether they are over or under-15,” she said.

While conceding that there will “always be ways” to circumvent the restrictions, she said France should “at least put our foot in the door when it comes to protecting minors online.”

Following Australia’s ban, more than 4.7 social media accounts deemed to be held by under 16s have been deactivated or removed, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said last month.

At the time, Albanese told CNN his government had implemented the ban because “we know that social harm is being caused, and therefore we have a responsibility as a government to respond to the pleas of parents and respond as well to the campaign of young people saying, just let us be kids.”

On the eve of the ban, Albanese addressed Australian teens in a video, urging them to “start a new sport, learn a new instrument, or read that book that has been sitting there on your shelf for some time.”

Elon Musk, the owner of X, signaled opposition to the ban in 2024, saying the proposal seems “like a backdoor war to control access to the Internet by all Australians.” X has, however, complied with the measures.

An impetus for the Australian ban was a book by the American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, which was published in 2024. When the wife of South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas read “The Anxious Generation” – which argues that social media has corroded the mental health of children – she began to give her husband a nightly summary of its contents. “You better bloody do something about this,” she told Malinauskas, who soon commissioned a draft law on potential solutions in the state, which later became a federal campaign.

“The basic argument of the book is that we’ve overprotected our children in the real world and we’ve under-protected them online. We were wrong on both points.” Haidt told CNN in 2024. As a solution, the book proposed a ban on smartphones in schools and on social media for under-16s. (CNN)

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