The French National Assembly has taken a first step towards banning access to social media for those under 15, a proposal supported by President Emmanuel Macron.
Lawmakers in the lower house approved key parts of the bill on Monday and are now expected to vote on the full text. The bill must still be approved by the upper house, the Senate.
If the legislation is passed, young teenagers will not be able to use networks such as Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok.
The French move is part of a global trend to restrict social media for children, sparked by growing evidence of the damage it can cause to mental health. A similar law was passed in Australia late last year.
“With this law, we will set a clear limit on society,” declared Laure Miller, one of the deputies behind the bill, quoted by Le Monde.
“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.”
Macron said he wanted the ban to be in place by the start of the school year in September.
“We cannot leave the mental and emotional health of our children in the hands of people whose sole purpose is to profit from them,” he said last month.
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 believed to be less dangerous would be accessible, but only with explicit parental approval.
The bill would have a good chance of passing, with pro-Macron parties likely to be joined by the center-right Republicans (LR) as well as the right-wing populist National Rally (RN).
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 MP Laure Miller, who chaired a parliamentary commission investigating 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, and the social media ban was a rare opportunity to win 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.
If the text is approved, it will go before 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.
