(Paris) Emmanuel Macron spoke out in favor of banning the telephone “before the age of 11” and social networks “before the age of 15”, in line with the report submitted to the president by a commission of experts on the impact of exposure of young people to screens.
“All the experts say it, addiction to screens is the breeding ground for all difficulties: harassment, violence, dropping out of school,” he declared during a press conference to launch the campaign for early legislative elections after the dissolution.
“We need an age for the digital majority, that protects,” he added.
The project to establish a numerical majority at 15 was already included in the presidential majority program for the European elections.
During his speech on Europe at the Sorbonne in April, Emmanuel Macron defended the idea of ”(a) Europe of digital majority at 15″, with, before this age, parental control over access to social networks.
PHOTO STEPHANE MAHE, REUTERS
Emmanuel Macron
But the practical aspect of implementing such a measure remains to be defined: in April, the Secretary of State in charge of Digital, Marina Ferrari, brought together players in the sector in Bercy to discuss in particular a technical solution to control the age of Internet users wishing to access certain sites.
The discussions focused on the means of controlling this digital majority and parental consent for minors aged 13 and 14.
Application at the European level also raises questions: in a letter sent in mid-August, European Commissioner Thierry Breton notably criticized the government for having adopted a law aimed at establishing a numerical majority at 15, seeming to him to “contradict” the European framework.
In France, tools for limiting screen time for minors are already available on certain applications or certain phones, and are also listed on a government site.
Parents can thus limit the time spent on the social networks Instagram or TikTok, set an online connection limit on iPhones or Nintendo consoles, or install a parental control application developed by Google, allowing them to restrict the overall time online. or by application.
Meta, for its part, introduced a “Late Notification” feature which appears “automatically” on the Instagram account of minor users when used between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m., to encourage them to close the application.
Making the adoption of these tools mandatory would require placing this legal responsibility on the applications or parents.
“Technically, the State could ask applications to block access from a certain time,” Olivier Ertzscheid, lecturer in Information and Communication Sciences, told AFP in January. He added that the question would be more that of the legal basis and the social acceptability of such an obligation. “This type of measure would be unprecedented in a democratic European country.”