PARIS — France’s President Emmanuel Macron is set on banning kids from social media.
All that stands in his way are legal fights, glitchy tech, a powerful lobby of Big Tech and Big Porn — and kids being kids.
Macron said late Tuesday that France “can’t wait” any longer in banning social media for children under 15, in response to the fatal stabbing of a teaching assistant at a high school in the suburbs of Paris. The stabbing came one month after a teenager killed a student in a similar incident at a high school in Nantes.
The incidents have determined the French government to keep kids away from what it considers harmful content, and has made France the epicenter of a fierce debate across Europe and the West over imposing limits on social media and smartphone use to better protect children online.
In the past year, Macron’s government has pushed to bar smartphones from schools and to limit screen use in nurseries. It has even gone head to head with the world’s biggest porn platforms, forcing them to verify their users’ age — a high-stakes move that prompted the owner of Pornhub, Redtube and YouPorn to stop serving porn in France earlier this month.
But the French crusade has also put Paris on a collision course with Brussels regulators, privacy rights groups and social media platforms.
Here’s what stands in the way of Macron and a French ban on social media for kids:
1. Paris is headed for a clash with Brussels
Paris insists it really wants an EU-wide regime, and Macron himself has said that banning kids would be a “European competence.”
“I’m giving us a few months to achieve European mobilization. Otherwise, I will negotiate with the Europeans so that we can do it ourselves in France,” the French president said Tuesday.
The government has launched a campaign to pressure other European countries to follow its example, with digital minister Clara Chappaz taking the lead.
“France cannot play it solo because member states have lost most of their competences” on regulating social media platforms, said Thibault Douville, a professor of French digital law.
In Brussels, though, European Union officials aren’t warming to the idea of an all-out ban for kids.
“Let’s be clear … [a] wide social media ban is not what the European Commission is doing. It’s not where we are heading to. Why? Because this is the prerogative of our member states,” Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier told reporters Wednesday.
Minors protection online is covered by the Digital Services Act, an EU-wide regulation that gives supervisory powers over Very Large Online Platforms such as major social media to the European Commission.
The Commission is readying its own measures on age verification, including guidelines and an app, but a social media ban is not foreseen.
EU countries can set a digital age of majority under the EU’s landmark privacy rules, the General Data Protection Regulation, Regnier said. “Of course, member states can go for that option.”
Under Article 8 of the GDPR, EU countries can set a minimum user age for platforms to process their data, provided it is over 13. But data can still be processed if parents give their consent, the law says.
On paper, this GDPR article bars minors under that age from accessing social media, but it leaves it up to the platforms to decide how to comply with this “digital majority.”
Ultimately, the Commission may have to challenge any French law imposing a ban — depending on its shape — which could lead to a long legal tussle.
2. Watchdogs warn of surveillance
To block kids from porn sites, France passed measures requiring that platforms verify age online using a double-blind method: where an independent age checker knows the person’s details, but not what platform they want to visit.
That has won the approval of the country’s CNIL data protection regulator, which found it protected privacy sufficiently.
But the privacy watchdog has stressed that age checks on the internet should only happen in specific contexts, such as when there are risks to minors.
If age verification creeps into more general use it could “lead to the establishment of a closed digital world, in which individuals would have to constantly prove their age, or even their identity, leading to significant risks to their rights and freedoms, including freedom of expression,” the regulator has warned.
Andy Yen, the chief executive officer of privacy technology company Proton, told POLITICO that “we’re really not debating age verification for children, we’re debating whether it makes sense to do age verification for everyone. And if you do age verification on everyone, there are definitely privacy and security considerations that come as a result of that.”
Trying to gauge someone’s age by profiling their activities online or using AI to estimate it from a selfie involves gathering huge amounts of information, said Urs Buscke, senior legal officer with European consumer organization BEUC. He said this conflicted with the GDPR’s key principle of data minimization, where data is only collected if it is strictly necessary.
3. The tech sector isn’t quite ready yet
For regulators and tech firms alike, enforcing a social media ban for kids is a nightmare.
Despite legal protections, almost half of children under 10 have social media accounts in Denmark, the country’s digital minister Caroline Stage Olsen said last week.
“There is no data” to suggest that these sorts of bans are effective, said Jessica Piotrowski, chair of the University of Amsterdam’s School of Communication Research and an adviser to YouTube on the issue of minors protection.
Instead, there is “some data that actually suggests, when you try to ban, it can actually do them harm, because [minors] find other ways instead,” Piotrowski said.
To make matters worse, Big Tech firms have clashed heavily over who should be responsible for checking the ages of internet users.
On the one side, Meta as well as porn platforms and others claim it should be up to companies running operating systems — most notably Apple, through its mobile system iOS, and Google through Android.
On the other, the owners of operating systems say the social media apps themselves have a responsibility to stop harmful content from reaching minors.
Some technologies used to check the age of internet users are having growing pains as well.
Research out this month claimed that Yoti, a leading age verification app that counts Meta among its customers, is “extensively tracking users without consent” and was operating with chinks in its cyber armor that “potentially could be manipulated by third parties.”
In response, Yoti said it had passed the information on to be investigated, but added that researchers had drawn “certain conclusions and extrapolations that are incorrect and potentially harmful to public confidence in a technology built with the intention of promoting and supporting online safety.”
The European Commission, meanwhile, is developing its own age verification app, but it remains in the testing phase in countries like Denmark, Italy, France, Greece and Spain.
4. Kids will find a way
The clearest data point showing that Paris faces an uphill battle came in the hours and days after porn platforms stopped serving adult content in France.
Virtual private networks, which allow internet users to bypass geographic restrictions, saw a surge in demand after Aylo Freesites, the parent company of Pornhub, Redtube and YouPorn, suspended the sites for French users this month.
Within half an hour of the suspension, ProtonVPN saw registrations increase by 1,000 percent, the VPN service said in a post on X. Demand for VPNs overall increased by 334 percent on June 4 compared to the average of the 28 previous days, ranking site Top10VPN said.
Whatever Macron’s plans, you can count on kids to figure out any and all possible ways to thwart them.
Eliza Gkritsi and Ellen O’Regan reported from Brussels. Émile Marzolf and Klara Durand reported from Paris. Pieter Haeck contributed reporting from Brussels.
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