Children under 15 in France should have no access to social media, and those aged between 15 and 18 should face a nighttime “digital curfew”, a French parliamentary committee urged on Thursday.
The recommendations were put forward in a report by the committee’s lawmakers after months of testimony from families, social media executives and influencers.
French President Emmanuel Macron’s office has already indicated it wants to see a social media ban for children and young adolescents after Australia started drafting its own landmark law with a prohibition for those under 16 in 2024.
The committee had initially been set up in March to examine TikTok and its psychological effects on minors after a 2024 lawsuit against the platform. The suit was filed by seven families accusing the popular short-form video platform of exposing their children to content that pushed them towards self-harm and suicide.
Its lead report writer, Laure Miller, warned that 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”.
Geraldine is the mother of an 18-year-old who committed suicide. After her daughter’s death last year, she said she discovered videos her daughter had published and looked at on TikTok. Many included self-harm, she told Agence France-Presse.
“TikTok didn’t kill our little girl,” Geraldine said. “She wasn’t well.”
But the 52-year-old, who declined to be identified by her last name, said TikTok had fallen short in its online moderation, which had plunged her late daughter deeper into her dark impulses.
Executives for TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, told the parliamentary committee that the app used artificial intelligence-enhanced moderation and that the system had caught 98 per cent of content infringing its terms of service in France.
For the lawmakers, those efforts were deemed insufficient. They also said TikTok’s rules were “very easy to circumvent”. The committee found that harmful content continued to proliferate on the app, and TikTok’s algorithm effectively drew young users into loops reinforcing such content.
The committee’s report suggested that the ban on children under 15 using social media could be broadened to everyone under 18 if, within the next three years, the platforms did not respect European laws.
Its recommendation for a “digital curfew” for users aged 15 to 18 was for social media to be made unavailable to them between the hours of 10pm and 8am.
