Children under 15 in France should be banned entirely from using social media, and those aged between 15 and 18 should face a “digital curfew” between 10pm and 8am, a French parliamentary committee urged on Thursday.
The recommendations were put forward in a report by the committee's legislators after months of testimony from families, social media executives and influencers.
President Emmanuel Macron's office has already indicated that it wants to see a ban for children and young adolescents, after Australia last year started drafting its own law including a prohibition for those under 16.
The committee was set up in March, initially to examine TikTok and its psychological effects on children. That was launched after a lawsuit last year against the platform by seven families accusing it of exposing their children to content that pushed them towards suicide.
Its lead report writer, Laure Miller, said the addictive design of TikTok and its algorithm “has been copied by other social media”. TikTok has stressed that the safety of young users of its app is its “top priority”.
Geraldine, the mother of an 18-year-old woman who died by suicide, told AFP that, after her daughter's death last year, she discovered videos of self-harm her daughter had published and viewed on TikTok.
“TikTok didn't kill our little girl, because she wasn't well in any case,” said Geraldine, 52, who declined to be identified by her last name.
But she accused TikTok of falling short in its online moderation and of plunging her daughter deeper into her dark impulses.
Meanwhile, executives for TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, told the parliamentary committee that the app used AI-enhanced moderation that last year caught 98 per cent of content infringing its terms of service in France.
But for the legislators, those efforts were deemed insufficient, and TikTok's rules were “very easy to circumvent”.
The committee also found that harmful content continued to proliferate on the app, and TikTok's algorithm was effective in drawing young users into loops reinforcing such content.
The committee's report suggested that the ban on children under 15 using social media could be broadened to everyone under 18 if, in the next three years, the platforms did not comply with European laws.
