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 (Sep 11).
The recommendations were put forward in a report by the committee’s lawmakers after months of testimony from families, social media executives and 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.
