The French National Assembly has backed a bill that would ban access to social networks for those under 15, a proposal supported by President Emmanuel Macron.
Lawmakers in the lower house approved key elements of the bill on Monday, before voting in favor of it by 116 votes to 23. Next, the bill will go to the upper house, the Senate, for approval.
If adopted, young adolescents will not be able to use networks such as Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok.
The French move is part of a growing trend to restrict social media for children, sparked by mounting evidence. the damage they can cause to mental health. A similar law was passed in Australia late last year.
After the National Assembly adopted the bill in an evening session from Monday to Tuesday, Macron called it a “major step.”
Writing on social media, he called on the government to accelerate the next steps, “so that this ban comes into force from next school year”. The new school year begins on September 1 in France.
“Our children’s brains are not for sale,” he writes.
Laure Miller, the MP behind the bill, declared to Le Monde: “With this law, we will set a clear limit on society.”
“We are saying one very simple thing: social networks are not trivial,” she added.
“These networks promised to bring people together. They separated them. They promised to inform. They saturated us with information. They promised to entertain. They locked people away.”
Last month, Macron said: “We cannot leave our children’s mental and emotional health in the hands of people whose only goal is to profit from them. »
According to the new text, the national media regulator would draw up a list of social networks deemed harmful. These would simply be prohibited for those under 15 years of age.
A separate list of sites supposedly less dangerous would be accessible, but only with explicit parental approval.
Another clause would ban the use of cell phones in high schools. The ban is already in effect in middle schools and colleges.
If the law is adopted, France will have to agree on the age verification mechanism. There is already a system that requires young people over the age of 18 to prove their age when accessing pornography online.
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 under-16s from social media.
The basis of the French bill is a text drafted late last year by Miller, who chaired a parliamentary commission of inquiry into the psychological effects of TikTok and other networks.
Separately, the government has been asked to draft its own legislation, after Macron decided to make the issue a centerpiece of his final year in power.
The president has been kept out of domestic politics since parliamentary elections he called in 2024 resulted in a hung parliament.
The social media ban was a rare opportunity to gain public favor.
For a time, the cause risked falling victim to feuds between Macron and his former prime minister Gabriel Attal (Miller is an MP in Attal’s party). But in the end, the government appears to have come around to Miller’s bill.
The bill is expected to pass the upper house, the Senate, next month. Macron said he had asked Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu’s government to use a fast-track procedure to have the legislation adopted by September.
Without the use of the accelerated procedure (which authorizes a single reading instead of two in each of the two chambers), the law would have little chance of catching up with the legislative delay created by Lecornu’s difficulties in having a budget adopted.
The bill has already had to be revised to take into account questions raised by the Council of State, the body which examines draft laws to ensure their compliance with French and European law.
A 2023 law that proposed a similar ban on social media for young teenagers was found to be unenforceable after courts ruled it broke European law.
