Macron threatens to bypass EU on social media ban

Telegraph

a day ago

Emmanuel Macron has vowed to ban social media for children under the age of 15 after a fatal school stabbing.
France, along with Greece, is leading the way in cracking down on social media platforms in Europe, passing a 2023 law requiring them to obtain parental consent for users under the age of 15.
The measure, however, has not received the European Union green light that it needs to come into force.
In an interview late on Tuesday, Mr Macron said: 'I'm giving us a few months to get European support.'
'If that doesn't work, I will negotiate with the Europeans so that we can start doing it in France. We can't wait,' he told the France 2 public broadcaster, hours after the fatal stabbing by a 14-year-old at a middle school in Nogent, Haute-Marne.
Mr Macron's call comes as France appears on a collision course with US president Donald Trump over restrictions on applications run by American tech giants, albeit in the name of child protection. The Trump administration has already slammed EU tech laws as 'overseas extortion'.
The call for the ban comes as police questioned the 14-year-old student on Tuesday over the stabbing of a 31-year-old school assistant during a bag search for weapons.
Francois Bayrou, the French prime minister, told parliament the incident was not an isolated case and that he intended to reinforce a ban on the sale of all types of knives to minors and experiment with security gates outside schools.
The Left has called for more assistants able to detect and help pupils with psychological issues, while the Right has accused Mr Macron of failing to secure educational establishments.
However, the stabbing of Mélanie G, as French media are calling her, took place during a bag check by gendarmes at the school. The assistant was not taking part in the check.
Anne-Marie Nedelec, a local official in Nogent and a senator, pointed the finger at social media and the internet.
' We've already banned mobile phones in secondary schools, but we need to go much further. We all know that there are platforms that constantly broadcast violence, pornography, calls for murder, calls to commit suicide, and so on. This has to stop,' she told France Inter.
'Our teenagers are living in a virtual world where people slit each other's throats, kill each other, come back to life, and then kill themselves again, but the problem is that here in real life, we don't come back to life. And Mélanie is dead, dead for good.'
Mr Macron said social media was one of the factors to blame for violence among young people.
France, along with Greece, Denmark and Spain, has led the way in pushing the EU to force platforms to verify the age of users when they create an account on apps such as Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat.
Writing on social media platform X, Mr Macron said such regulation was backed by experts. 'Platforms have the ability to verify age. Do it,' he wrote.
France has also followed the UK and the Netherlands this week in allowing Netflix sensation Adolescence, which highlighted some of the harmful content children view online, to be used in secondary schools to teach teenagers about toxic masculinity.
The Macron government, a long-time ally of Big Tech, has in recent years moved to regulate social media apps more stringently.
That has exacerbated tensions with the Trump administration, which is ramping up attacks on Europe's digital rules, along with the threat of trade sanctions.
Taking steps to address certain risks
Last month, the US state department sent a request to its offices around Europe seeking 'examples of government efforts to limit freedom of speech', according to The Wall Street Journal.
The US 'is committed to shutting down the global censorship-industrial complex', it wrote.
Internal instructions cite as guidance a speech JD Vance, the US vice president, gave in Munich earlier this year, in which he accused EU 'commissars' of censorship.
It cited US diplomats as warning the country 'will take steps to ensure that American companies are not strong-armed into enforcing a European censorship regime that is harmful to American interests, European interests, and the world'.
The EU's Digital Services Act (DSA), adopted in 2022, regulates European activities of the world's largest digital platforms, many of which are American.
The DSA requires platforms to show they are taking steps to address certain risks, including the spread of illegal content and the use of disinformation to manipulate election results.
Darren Beattie, the acting undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, told the Wall Street Journal: 'Obviously, we don't love the idea of the Europeans censoring their own citizens, but the principal concern is these spillover effects affecting content-moderation policies and a variety of free speech concerns within the United States.
'And there are various mechanisms within the DSA that are concerning in that regard.'
EU officials say the law, which only applies in the EU, doesn't threaten free speech and is designed to protect Europeans' basic rights and to help keep children safe online.
'The DSA is absolutely not a censorship tool,' said European Commission spokesman Thomas Regnier. 'To the contrary, freedom of expression is at the heart of the DSA.'