Emmanuel Macron will support a proposal to ban the use of smartphones for children under 11 and social media for children under 15 throughout France, it emerged last night.
The French president is backing proposals made in a report earlier this year by a panel of experts commissioned by the Elysee Palace amid growing concern about the negative effects of technology and social media use on children and adolescents.
Macron put the issue on his presidential agenda earlier this year amid declining approval ratings.
But there is no information on how such a blanket ban would be implemented, and lawmakers are now set to decide which apps will qualify for the ban and discuss the finer details of enforcing the recommended measures.
French President Emmanuel Macron is seen during a press conference on June 12, 2024 in Paris, France.
Macron will support a proposed ban on the use of smartphones for children under 11 and social networks for children under 15 throughout France, it emerged last night
The expert panel, led by neurologist Servane Mouton and psychiatry professor Amine Benyamina, and also including experts in education, law and technology, delivered its findings to Macron in April.
It recommended that all children under 11 years of age should not be allowed to use a smartphone and should not be given a smartphone with Internet access before the age of 13.
Social media apps should be banned for children under 15, they added, and children over 15 should only have access to platforms deemed “ethical”, although the report does not specify which platforms would be excluded from such restrictions.
There is currently no timetable for new legislation and it is unclear to what extent it would follow experts’ recommendations.
The group said any future measures should focus on tightening rules for technology companies.
“Those are the main culprits,” Mouton said at a news conference in April.
How such a ban would be implemented is still unclear, and commentators are divided over whether app makers and tech companies would be forced to build age restrictions into their apps, or whether parents would be responsible for enforcing them. the ban at home.
Some tools to limit the screen and running time of social media apps are already built into most smartphones, but the user can change these limits at any time.
This has raised questions about whether the French government will seek to introduce legislation forcing technology companies to enable some type of age verification tool.
Olivier Ertzscheid, professor of information and communication sciences, told AFP in January that the key questions revolve around the legal basis and social acceptability of such an obligation.
“This type of measure would be unprecedented in a democratic European country,” he added.
But there is a body of evidence to suggest that young people’s mental health is negatively affected by social media use.
Macron put the issue on his presidential agenda earlier this year amid falling approval ratings, in a bid to respond to growing international concern that new technologies may be causing more harm than good to young minds.
There is a body of evidence suggesting that young people’s mental health is negatively affected by social media use.
Internet addiction rewires teens’ brains and may make them more likely to engage in other addictive behaviors, new research suggests (file photo)
A UCL study published earlier this month found that the addictive nature of social media platforms rewires teenagers’ brains and may make them more likely to engage in other addictive behaviours.
The findings, published in the journal More mental healthindicate that Internet addiction is associated with altered signaling in brain regions involved in multiple neural networks.
Their study, which reviewed 12 separate neuroimaging studies of adolescents showing heavy Internet use, found that when Internet addicts engaged in activities governed by the brain’s executive control network (such as behaviors that require attention, planning, decision-making and especially impulsivity) those brain regions showed a “significant” alteration in their ability to work together.
Study co-author Max Chang said: “These networks play an important role in controlling our attention, in association with intellectual ability, working memory, physical coordination and emotional processing.”
‘All of which, in turn, has an impact on mental health.
“Given that adolescent brains are more capable of change than adults’, understanding the effects of Internet addiction on brain and behavior is vital for society as a whole.”
