Major step – French MPs vote in favour of bill to ban social media for under-15s

France’s parliament has backed a bill that would ban social media access for under-15s, a proposal supported by president Emmanuel Macron.

Lawmakers in the lower house on Monday agreed key elements of the bill, before voting 116-23 in its favour. Next, the bill will go to the upper house, the Senate, for approval.

If it is passed, young teenagers would not be able to use networks such as Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok.

The French move is part of a growing trend of restricting social networks for children, triggered by increasing evidence of the damage they can cause to mental health. A similar law was passed in Australia late last year.

After the National Assembly passed the bill in an overnight session from Monday to Tuesday, Macron called it a “major step”.

Writing on social media, he called for the government to accelerate the next steps, “so that this ban takes effect as early as next school year”. The new school year begins on 1 September in France.

“Our children’s brains are not for sale,” he wrote.

Laure Miller, a member of parliament (MP) behind the bill, tells Le Monde: “With this law we will set down a clear limit in society.”

“We are saying something very simple: social networks are not harmless,” she adds.

“These networks promised to bring people together. They pulled them apart. They promised to inform. They saturated us with information. They promised to entertain. They shut people away.”

Last month, Macron said: “We cannot leave the mental and emotional health of our children in the hands of people whose sole purpose is to make money out of them.”

Under the new text, the state media regulator would draw up a list of social media networks that are deemed harmful.

These would be simply banned for under 15-year-olds.

A separate list of supposedly less harmful sites would be accessible, but only with explicit parental approval.

Another clause would ban the use of mobile telephones in senior schools. The ban is already in effect in junior and middle schools.

If the law is passed, France will need to agree on the mechanism for age-verification. A system is already in place that requires over 18 year-olds to prove their age when accessing online pornography.

In Europe, Denmark, Greece, Spain and Ireland are also considering following the Australian example. Earlier this month, the United Kingdom government launched a consultation on banning social media for under-16s.

The basis of the proposed French law is a text drawn up late last year by Miller, who chaired a parliamentary committee enquiry into the psychological effects of TikTok and other networks.

Separately, the government was told to draw up its own legislation, after Macron decided to make the issue a centrepiece of his last year in office.

The president has been sidelined from domestic politics since the assembly elections which he called in 2024 resulted in a hung parliament.

The social media ban has been a rare chance to court public favour.

For a time the cause risked falling victim to bickering between Macron and his one-time prime minister Gabriel Attal (Miller is an MP from Attal’s party). But in the end the government appears to have rallied behind the Miller bill.

The bill is expected to pass before the Senate in the next month. Macron said he had asked the government of prime minister Sébastien Lecornu to use a fast-track procedure to get the legislation on the books by September.

Without resort to the fast-track (which permits a single reading as opposed to two in each of the two houses), the law would have little chance of getting past the legislative backlog created by Lecornu’s difficulties in passing a budget.

The bill has already had to be redrafted to take account of questions raised by the Council of State, the body which previews draft legislation to ensure it conforms with French and European law.

A 2023 law which proposed a similar ban on social media for young teenagers proved inoperable after courts decided it broke European law. – BBC

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