PARIS, June 11 (Reuters) - French President Emmanuel Macron said he would push for European Union regulation to ban social media for children under the age of 15 after a fatal stabbing at a school in eastern France, the latest such violent attack that left the country reeling.
“If that does not work, we will start to do it in France. We cannot wait,”
This is not specified here, but they also want to ban white weapons sales to minors, which seems better suited to counter this horrible stabbing.
That’s the same guy who was pushing for a ban on video games. He’s just completely clueless and will say anything to say “something”.
COPPA already bans under-13s, so is that two year difference really worth the effort and cost? It doesn’t sound like it does to me…
Well that is in the US, not France.
Also, I don’t mind a legal ban on minors below 15,but this would certainly mean age verification for everyone else.
Writing on social media platform X after the interview, Macron said such regulation was backed by experts. “Platforms have the ability to verify age. Do it,” he wrote
It applies to all data handled by US companies, which the overwhelming majority of social media companies are. The only social media available in France (so excluding Douyin, QQ, etc) with 500M+ global users that isn’t american is Telegram, and I have serious doubts they wouldn’t just ignore the law.
What is white weapons?
For example, although callipers are designed for measuring purposes, they could also be used to cause serious injury. It’s what you call a white weapon.
Nah, I don’t think it’s about the purpose of the tool/weapon. It’s most likely a literal translation from the French “arme blanche”, which is any mechanical, non-explosion-based weapon. So knives and all that stuff, regardless of whether it was primarily designed to be a weapon.
That’s right
How would this ban go about being enforced? Restricting social media for minors is absolutely necessary but it needs to be done on a community basis, through families themselves.
If the state reaches in, their early methods will be ineffective and outdated, and that will serve as justification for more privacy violations that they drag up.
First, if the government simply blocks access to websites, teens will just use VPNs. If platforms like Facebook start banning them, they’ll jump ship to private forums and chat apps.
Then, if the government decides to use this as justification to loosen up digital privacy law and tighten their grip around encryption, or introduce an ID system, people will find loopholes around that as well, especially tech-savvy teenagers. Not aging bureaucrats out of touch with what they’re supposed to regulate and choked in red tape.
The state would then try to shoehorn in a pretext and try to backdoor chats, or any other equally dangerous attack on encryption.
Security will worsen for everyone, privacy will be violated for those doing nothing to be monitored in the first place, and those who are meant to be tracked would find ways to escape.
It seems governments still have not learned that there is no easy way out of this, that the internet inherently makes it counterproductive to censor and surveil people en masse, and that trying to ban teenagers from talking to one another with computers is not possible, and will not solve actual problems causing youth crime.
I would be careful since France has a history of digital rights violations and police tyranny, and given recent events like their arrest of Telegram’s CEO (not a good app for privacy, but they still arrested him because he refused to work with their police) it seems like Macron’s testing the PR waters to see what the government can get away with. And this seems to be a problem regardless of which party comes to power soon.
I hate social media as much as the next person on this forum but watching governments confidently assuring they’ll censor it is sounding alarm bells. It is good to be vigilant.
Exactly. Ban Social Media for group X, and group X will just bypass the restriction, while (most of )the rest will probably comply and happily provides ID. If your goal is to monitor every citizen social media, congratulations, goal achieved!
Well summarized.