https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2026/01/27/french-l...
> The amended and adopted text now states that "access to an online social network service provided by an online platform is prohibited for minors under the age of 15." This is a more ambiguous formulation, as it does not explicitly impose any requirements on social networks. However, as a consequence, "platforms will have to implement age verification measures to ensure the effectiveness of this measure," the government promised in the explanatory statement of the amendment. For major platforms like Instagram or Snapchat, sanctions would fall under the jurisdiction of the European Commission.
> This has raised eyebrows among several law experts specializing in European digital law, whom Le Monde interviewed. "The bill is legally fragile," warned Brunessen Bertrand, law professor at the University of Rennes-I. In her view, it is based on a "broad and highly questionable interpretation" of European rules.
European law takes precedence over national law, so the effectiveness of the bill appears to be limited. The same thing happened with the French age verification bill for adult websites.
Which European law supersedes this law? My unfamiliar guess is that if there is no specific contradiction then French law stands, otherwise how can any country pass any laws in the EU?
> "By imposing a ban on access to social media on online platforms, the wording of the proposed law could be seen as raising difficulties with regard to the Digital Services Act."
I have encountered this for myself.
A few months ago New York banned phones at lunch and was discussed on HN [1]
We live in times where parents and schools no longer have the authority to enforce behaviour and social media is peer pressure from the entire world.
These bans are obviously heavy handed but hopefully they are a reversion back to an equilibrium that gives our young a chance to properly develop...
...What? They certainly can, if they're banning certain behavior?
0: https://www.ouest-france.fr/education/les-telephones-bientot...
> We live in times where parents and schools no longer have the authority to enforce behavior
Yes but the problem is much deeper.
I often observer various "families" with their kids on holidays. The French and the Brits are really a nightmare, strangely the same countries who are now banning social media. But my guess is this is more of chicken than an egg problem.
You will often have an hysterical woman, totally deranged and often alone, screaming constantly on the kids for no reasons. You wish you could call child protective services on them and this is only when they are "relaxing" on holiday.
We know those kids are gonna get into weird internet things and drugs anyway to escape this world. France can write any law they want it is not gonna solve the problem and send them back to any "equilibrium".
Blaming TV, video games and now social media 20 years late is just a way to avoid talking about the real problem.
Not really, I was born in the 80s and video games did help me know a lot of people I still hang out with.
So like, I am all for restricting kids from it, and honestly I'd happily see it regulated out of existence entirely.
Maybe double check who owns and controls most social media platforms, and then think a bit if you'd categorize them more in the ruling class or working class.
That illuminati mumbo jumbo part doesn't deserve a comment.
if algorithmic amplification is the reason then I'm not sure why social media as a whole has to be banned over it.
I’m not trying to be a jerk, but did you actually participate in “Internet forums back in the day?” I couldn’t think of anything more different than contemporary social media. Internet forums in late 90’s and early 00’s were something special. Hell, I had more “internet friends” from online forums attend my wedding than I did friends from high school or college… and for some it was the first time meeting in person.
Infinite feeds are designed to game you for attention, whereas the forums of yore were there to facilitate discussions.
I'm sure some forums would also have liked to game you if they could, but they didn't have the scale to always have something juicy to serve up.
To me it's super uncomfortable to expose my kids to a product designed by large teams with the goal of making it addictive.
I find it uncomfortable for the government to yoink any citizen’s access to discussion platforms. I would be more comfortable with other means.
No? On what grounds? HN uses opaque feed ranking algorithms. It's run by a for-profit US tech company. It uses dark patterns (e.g. shadowbans and unwired "flag" links) that prompt users to engage under false pretenses.
It even has advertisements. The horror!
Yet nobody serious says HN is harmful to the fledging minor technologist.
I've yet to see a logical rule allowing minors to access HN but prohibiting their scrolling Instagram. Every demarcation scheme I've seen is some variant of "big company bad", which is a ridiculous standard for a law intended to prevent the harms that the "structure* of a medium (as opposed to the identity of its owners) produces.
In a nation of laws, an act is allowed or prohibited based on the nature of the act itself. Actors don't get special privileges based on who they are.
1. On average, it is a net negative for under 15s to participate in Instagram, TikTok, Xitter, YouTube, Snapchat, etc
2. On average, it is a net positive for under 15s to participate in HN, old-school forums, and the like.
3. It is not possible to legally differentiate services referred to in points 1 & 2, so a ban must be all-or-nothing.
Given the relative number of under-15s participating in each category of services, do you think that is the case?
Is it?
If so then I would say the term "social media" has more or less lost all meaning.
To me HN is more like an old-school forum - it has a focus and it has a mod team to keep the rails on the discussion and keep the topics vaguely on topic.
Or go in reverse, look at research into correlation between mental health issues and social media use and extrapolate contributing factors, from those extract the features
Should give a starting point for nailing down the definition.
There are others major differences like the lack of infinite doomscrolling, or the personalised feed to optimise engagement.
To the wider point that maybe we should be preventing kids from accessing classes of things rather than particular services - yeah probably, but it's much easier to manage a blocklist starting with the worst offenders, and that might be a good enough start down the path of harm reduction.
The old forums were populated by people with specific interests who sought out community. This is opposed to modern social media where everyone is on a single (or several) platforms where the community is recommended to you. This bypasses the first mental defense of actively sifting through content.
The second difference is the commodification of attention. Old forums have no intention of keeping you on them. You are free to join and leave as you please, so are others there. In contrast, modern social media have become a place where people need to be to network online (see Facebook and LinkedIn). In addition, the incentive of advertisements encourage social media to keep your attention as a source of revenue than to serve your interests as a user.
So if governments want to regulate social media, I'm all up for it. They regulated gambling and drugs for addiction, why not social media.
The message boards I participated when I was a young teenager were mostly focused on a specific topic (a specific videogame or series of videogame, or a specific genre), with some off-topics board on the side. They were contained communities; village-like if you will. If you don't like one you could hop on another website that had another set of members, customs, and rules.
(yes, you can sort-of see that small village feel with some Discord group or subreddit; but back then the media were controlled by an admin, not a centralized for-profit group)
Contrast this with today's infinite feed were everyone could potentially reach anyone, all curated by The Algorithm(tm) with a vague notion of "friend" or "subscriber".
I don't think internet forums are comparable to what social media are today, in the scale (it was a marginal activity 15 years ago) and the impact it has on your own life.
Back in the day, it was much less concentrated and less dangerous than what you can get today.
Every generation has to have a panic about the children.
Where the whole population is addicted and governors risk their political career to ban the addiction, and then get their territory invaded by the corporations they kicked out who have returned with a foreign military and mercenary army, to push the addiction back on the populace
Actually sounds like a not so bad setting for a book/game/movie ngl; sure sounds like a garbage setting for a world to actually live in.
Tiktok is to early forums like meth is to black tea.
It’s hard to think of something genuinely positive about platforms like instagram YouTube and twitter nowadays.
Trying to share genuine joy in an activity is still possible but the platforms heavily push frequent users to think of themselves as ‘content creators’ and produce trivial yet popular video clips with all the negatives that brings.
Most of the people on this platform are left-leaning, and social media has allowed right-wing ideas to spread among the youth, ideas which they'd never have been exposed to if their information was filtered through left-leaning teachers and media as it was in previous decades. They want to ban social media in an attempt to bring future youth back leftwards.
But meh, it's a broader issue anyway. Just look at the puritanical obsession some people have with pornography too.
Young people these days are getting infantilised way too much imho and that's just not healthy. There needs to be a safe environment to transition into adulthood with gradual exposure to all kinds of things, rather than turning 18 and suddenly being a different category of person entirely.
- Distract from homework, exercise and family activities.
- Disrupt sleep.
- Lead to information that is biased or not correct.
... Ah, just like that public health menace, the public library.
I don't believe "social media" is actually injurious to youths. The studies saying it does, ISTM, are all confounded, of poor quality, and ride off publication bias. And yeah, it's remarkable that a lot of people on this very thread ago grew up on the Internet and gained lifelong technical skills want to pull the ladder up after them on the grounds of unproven and implausible harms.
In reality, the drive for social media age limits is the latest in a long line of moral panics. In the 80s, it was D&D corrupting innocent souls. Now, it's feed ranking? I don't believe any of it.
Looking for reason at the root of a moral panic usually leads only to despair. These things just have to be endured.
I think it’s telling that many people here who work in tech don’t want social media for their kids, but there are no comic book readers who want to ban comics for their kids.
The comparison is wrong.
It would be more "It is like if children were forbidden to be in a smoker room, just because they are not the one consuming".
Yes they should be forbidden, because they do not need to smoke themselves to feel the negative effects.
Even without "porn", "murdering/violence" or other controversial content that can be found on social medias, just the negative effects of doomscrolling on the brain are harmful enough.
Their is plenty of studies that describe the effect it has on attention span, memory and cognitive capacity of kids.
https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=14350...
And lets face it: Over the last 10y, any attempt to regulate the platforms responsible of that failed miserably.
We are ourselves now on a sort of social media platform which shows it’s possible to be responsible and use it wisely with a better design and more rules. Framing the decision in France like a fight against a nocive substance is lazy and avoid talking about nuanced regulation and digital literacy which are more effective approaches. There are studies showing that regulating adolescent social media use is better than a ban for example.
Not in disagreement. I believe that the ban is not even strictly applicable.
It will just lead to the redirection to a new platform that avoid the restrictions or any jurisdiction, which is worst.
The complete lack of will to tackle the problem by the main Mega networks (Meta, X, Tiktok, Snapchat, Telegram and even Youtube) is currently the main issues here.
For instance, enforcing a "report" to the consummer weekly with the effective time spend on scrolling to promote awareness and help to prevent addiction would already be a first good move. None of them implemented that effectively.
I think it depends on your definition of withdrawal, but it seems that some teens did experience something analagous to it here in Australia.
I think this counts in favour of the ban, myself.
Errr... there are quite a few places where children aren't allowed to enter a bar, or can only go to them with parents if the establishment also serves food.
> Enforcing platform’s safety and educating users (young and old) would be much better to help everyone
It's not 100% clear to me this is true, it may be that the way social media operates is just bad for developing brains. Maybe all brains....
It would be nice to have good evidence one way or another though.
There are so many ways the platforms can be changed but France decided they've tried nothing and they're all out of ideas.
> Just banning it instead of searching for a good balance won’t help the next generation to understand the world and take a part in it.
I would dispute that you need to be anywhere near social media to take part in the world, in fact I'd go so far as to say it's the opposite. Social media is playing into isolation and anxiety for young people. Putting some distance between them and the social media companies is likely to be healthy.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/04/age-verification-europ...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/04/age-verification-europ...
For example, discussions about recent killings by ICE in the US. This example is one where I really don't want to tie my real life ID to my online presence for fear of retribution if I ever feel confident to travel to there again.
Yet in practice, yeah, it'll be the death of anonymity. To allow ZKPs to take off would be letting a good panic go to waste, right? /s
While I believe the genesis of this age limit push is a good old fashioned moral panic, it's also obvious that the usual enemies of free speech are salivating at using this panic as a pretext to ban anonymity on the internet.
Then if the age verification is in the hands of these companies that is bad. There's nothing they'd like more than knowing exactly who you are.
It's the exact same problem with adding software the voting process.
That's why every single part of life needs to be written in law books, otherwise french people are lost. They built USSR in their own mind. As parents don't have the guts to say no to their children, they need the politicians to raise their kids. And french politicians think they are ruling the laws of physics (or medecine) with speeches and printed papers. Everybody is happy.
These platforms rely on ads to survive. Which means it should be easy to regulate them. You can prevent them from selling ads at which point they will be forced to comply. If they don't, someone else will get the ad revenue. Europe is already hostile towards american tech giants anyways.
The possibilities are endless. Pass a law that forces all social media with more than x users to not implement constant scrolling, make their ranking algorithm open source, allow people to use their own algorithms, employ robust moderation etc.
Instead we have a blanket ban that requires id checks but leaves the manipulation machine intact so it can prey on adults. Mental health is not the real issue here. They want to be able to track people and destroy anonimity online. Children are a convenient excuse.
I don't share your cynicism pertaining to motives. Well, I am cynical about it, but in a non-conspiratorial way.
Politicians are feckless trend followers, cowardly in their disposition, preferring to follow the path of least resistance, and they lack any substantial vision or imagination themselves.
That explains why nothing bold is happening. And that lack of boldness is not unique to social media regulation.
That puts me squarely in the "this isn't perfect, but it's a good step" camp.
You'd have skipped multiple years in education, hence you'd be massively more intelligent then the general population that this regulation aims to help, (albeit against their own wishes).
It's not "politics" that's harmful, it's politicians continuously acting against the interests of the younger generation. Trying to suppress the youth's ability to discuss and organize against that is tyrannical.
Okay but the conversation isn't "Should we have safeguards" it's "How do we handle the poison?".
To me, it seems pretty analogous to alcohol, etc. You don't prohibit alcohol. You define an age in which you're willing to declare people mature enough to tolerate letting them make their own decisions.
The rules online is different. Not only are they not responsible for the content they distribute, but when they do break the law anyway the only punishment that they get is a small fine.
Around 30% of facebook advertisements are scams. That would not had worked with TV stations of old.
How does one country legislate the content of a company based in another country?
Do you think that censorship is a better solution?
Exactly..
They will use any trick or loophole available to keep the reach and to exploit attention spans. Kids brains aren't correct really made for social media whatsoever. Ban is justified and the bar should be even higher than 15 years old, but it's a start.
I have a young baby and no way it touches anything smartphone related for many many years, same goes with TV to a certain extent (these things are like smartphones nowadays with all the apps and programme fighting for your attention and to enrage you). I am doing my part, I for sure expect the government does their thing as well. Exploitators should stay in check and at bay with any means necessary
This feels like you intended to make it a gotcha question, but the answer is: America isn't really trying to do that at all. So we should just give up?
"Damn, handling biowaste is hard and dangerous, what we'll do is just prevent people from leaving their house."
From Nature[1]:
> Time spent on social media among the least influential factors in adolescent mental health
From the Atlantic[2] with citations in the article:
> The Panic Over Smartphones Doesn’t Help Teens,
> It may only make things worse.
> I am a developmental psychologist, and for the past 20 years, I have worked to identify how children develop mental illnesses. Since 2008, I have studied 10-to-15-year-olds using their mobile phones, with the goal of testing how a wide range of their daily experiences, including their digital-technology use, influences their mental health. My colleagues and I have repeatedly failed to find compelling support for the claim that digital-technology use is a major contributor to adolescent depression and other mental-health symptoms.
> Many other researchers have found the same. In fact, a recent study and a review of research on social media and depression concluded that social media is one of the least influential factors in predicting adolescents’ mental health. The most influential factors include a family history of mental disorder; early exposure to adversity, such as violence and discrimination; and school- and family-related stressors, among others. At the end of last year, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a report concluding, “Available research that links social media to health shows small effects and weak associations, which may be influenced by a combination of good and bad experiences. Contrary to the current cultural narrative that social media is universally harmful to adolescents, the reality is more complicated.”
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s44220-023-00063-7
[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/05/candi...
Sure, you may be able to find 1 or 2 counterexamples, big tabacco also had a lot of "doctors" who found smoking not that bad.
https://www.reuters.com/business/instagram-shows-more-eating...
> The researchers stressed that their findings did not prove that Instagram was making users feel worse about their bodies. “It is not possible to establish the causal direction of these findings,” they wrote, noting the possibility that teens who felt bad about themselves could be actively seeking out that material.
Should we ban libraries because someone who is depressed might seek out a Sylvia Plath book?
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/instagram-shows-more-eating...