French lawmakers urge social media ban for under-15s
www.rfi.fr
French lawmakers urged a social media ban for under-15s and "digital curfew" for older minors Thursday, with massively popular short video platform TikTok the focus of renewed harsh government scrutiny.

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/37268108

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Source: Commission of inquiry into the psychological effects of TikTok on minors.

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Imposing the ban and a 10 pm to 8 am curfew for 15- to 18-year-olds would “send a signal both to children and parents” that social media “is not harmless” for the young, Laure Miller, the MP who compiled a parliamentary inquiry’s report, told AFP.

With more than 1.5 billion users worldwide, TikTok – owned by China-based ByteDance – has been especially under fire from Western governments in Europe and the US in recent years.

Concerns raised over the platform have included content encouraging suicide, self harm or an unhealthy body image as well as its potential use for foreign political interference.

French President Emmanuel Macron has already backed a social media ban for children and young adolescents, following in the footsteps of Australia which started drafting its own landmark ban for under-16s last year.

Meanwhile TikTok is in legal limbo in America, as President Donald Trump has permitted the platform to continue operating there despite a law requiring its sale.

The service was also singled out as a vector for Russian influence when Romania’s presidential election was controversially annulled last year by the country’s supreme court.

Launched in March, the French parliamentary committee set out 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.

Members put forward Thursday’s recommendations – welcomed by Laure Boutron-Marmion, a lawyer representing the families – after months of testimony from families, social media executives and influencers.

  • network_switch@lemmy.mlEnglish
    52·
    23 hours ago

    They don’t want kids to know too well how their government operates domestically and internationally. Don’t want kids to learn history much better than the watered down version they learn in school

    • Blisterexe@lemmy.zipEnglish
      2·
      10 hours ago

      That doesn’t seem to be the primary reason to me, given I went to french high school, and they didn’t shy away from talking about the shitty stuff france did and does.

      • network_switch@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        3 hours ago

        It’s an entirely different level of learning from fairly dry school and footage of massacres, slave mines/plantations-housing, exploring granular data of fatalities (age, civilian or freedom fighter), volume of rape, changes in life expectancy, images of indentured farmers dealing with famine as food is exported. Not a single country tries hard to convey just how terrible life was for generations of people under colonial rule. Not a single colonial country is treating their past leaders in their schools history books as they would treat Hitler when they should be. I regularly hear the delusion that post-WW2 was a peaceful transition for post colonialism as if Algeria and Vietnam weren’t millions of lives taken. That the decades after WW2 wasn’t western backed coup after coup, assassination after assassination. Economic isolation for not accepting colonial rule. Colonialism only ended to a degree because colonial powers could no longer afford to keep their colonies in the face of improving domestic resistance and competition for influence with the Soviet Union. The US and Russia are post-WW2’s most prominent imperialist. 3rd place would be France across southeast Asia to the present in Africa though that coercive power waning

        All the watered down education in the US, France, etc didn’t stop the past 80 years of colonialism and it looks to me like countries in Europe want to be competitive imperial powers again now that the US isn’t being as much of a team player anymore. Social media is making people less patriotic. Less likely to join the military. Less likely to stomach the slaughter of war. Restrict social media and the results of your countries actions can be better kept low velocity spread. France has even better marketing than the US even before Trump. France has been the third worst offenders of colonialism and imperialism both violent and economic post-WW2. It would take years and years of dedicated classes to try to actually convey how evil the French and every colonial power was and how banal their populaces were to that evil and generally still are to this day. It’s not only the US with a sanatized history, uneducated population, subject to decades to centuries of propaganda and a warped view of how their country operates overseas