Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI:France is planning to ban children under 15 from social media sites and to prohibit mobile phones in high schools from September 2026, Reported AP. President Emmanuel Macron has often pointed to social media as one of the factors to blame for violence among young people and has signalled he wants France to follow Australia, whose worldfirst ban for under-16s on social media platforms including Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube came into force in December.
A draft bill preventing under-15s from using social media will be submitted for legal checks and is expected to be debated in Parliament early in the new year, reported The Guardian. The bill will be submitted to France’s Conseil d’État for legal review in the coming days. Education unions will also look at the proposed high-school ban on phones.
Mobile phones have been banned in French primary and middle schools since 2018 and the reported new changes would extend that ban to high schools.
Various other countries have also taken steps to regulate children’s access to social media France also passed a law in 2023 requiring social platforms to obtain parental consent for under-15s to create accounts, though technical challenges have impeded its enforcement. Macron said in June he would push for regulation at the level of the European Union to ban access to social media for all under-15s after a fatal stabbing at a school in eastern France shocked the nation.
The European Parliament in November urged the EU to set minimum age for children to access social media to combat a rise in mental health problems among adolescents from excessive exposure, although it is member states which impose age limits.
