After Australia, the United Kingdom and Malaysia, France is also looking to ban social media access for those under 15, according to a EuroNews report. President Emmanuel Macron said on Sunday that his administration would speed up the process of blocking access to social media by September 2026, the start of the country's new school year.
According to Macron, the brains and emotions of French children and teenagers "are not for sale or manipulation by American platforms or Chinese algorithms." Last year, he gave the European Union (EU) two months to implement the ban before France did it itself through an online digital age verification system.
It is still not known what sites France will categorize as social media and what penalties will be imposed on operators if they fail to block users under 15. In Australia, YouTube's classification as social media was opposed by Google but they finally agreed and are now blocking access to users under 16.
