French lawmakers urge social media ban for under-15s

PARIS: Children under 15 in France should be banned entirely from using social media, and those aged between 15 and 18 should face a nighttime “digital curfew”, a French parliamentary committee urged on Thursday.

The recommendations were put forward in a report by the committee’s lawmakers after months of testimony from families, social media executives and from influencers.

President Emmanuel Macron’s office has already indicated it wants to see a ban for children and young adolescents, after Australia last year started drafting its own landmark law with a prohibition for those under 16.

Committee chief Arthur Delaporte told AFP he would also file a criminal complaint with prosecutors against the massively popular short video platform TikTok for “endangering the lives” of users.

The committee had been set up in March, initially to examine TikTok and its psychological effects on minors after a 2024 lawsuit against the platform by seven families accusing it of exposing their children to content pushing them towards suicide.

Its lead report writer, Laure Miller, said the addictive design of TikTok and its algorithm “has been copied by other social media”.

TikTok has stressed that the safety of young users of its app is its “top priority”.

But Delaporte said that “there’s no question that the platform knows what is going wrong, that their algorithm is problematic, and that there is a kind of active complicity in endangering” users.

Geraldine, the mother of an 18-year-old woman who committed suicide, told AFP that, after her daughter’s death last year, she had discovered videos of self-harm her daughter had published and looked at on TikTok.

“TikTok didn’t kill our little girl, because she wasn’t well in any case,” said Geraldine, 52, who declined to be identified by her last name.

But she accused TikTok of falling short in its online moderation, and plunging her daughter deeper into her dark impulses.

TikTok testimony

Executives for TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, told the parliamentary committee that the app used AI-enhanced moderation that last year caught 98 percent of content infringing its terms of service in France.

But for the lawmakers, those efforts were deemed insufficient, and TikTok’s rules were “very easy to circumvent”.

It also found that harmful content continued to proliferate on the app, and TikTok’s algorithm was effective in drawing young users into loops reinforcing such content.

In a criminal complaint seen by AFP, Delaporte said TikTok’s Europe, Middle East and Africa chief Marlene Masure might be guilty of lying to the committee about TikTok’s potential harms detailed in internal files leaked to US and French media.

“When they said they didn’t know about that, to me that’s lying under oath,” he added.

The committee’s report suggested that the ban on children under 15 using social media could be broadened to everyone under 18 if, within the next three years, the platforms did not respect European laws.

Its recommendation for a “digital curfew” for users aged 15 to 18 was for social media to be made unavailable to them between the hours of 10 pm and 8 am.