फ्रांसीसी राष्ट्रपति मैक्रों बोले- हमारे बच्चों का दिमाग बिकाऊ नहीं: सोशल मीडिया इस्तेमाल करने पर जल्द बैन लगाएंगे, हाई स्कूल में मोबाइल पर भी रोक

French President Emmanuel Macron said that the minds of his children and teenagers are not for sale. According to CNN report, he said that social media will be banned for children below 15 years of age before September. For this, the government is working to complete the legal process expeditiously.

He clearly said that social media will be banned for children below 15 years of age and mobile phones will also be banned in high schools. According to Macron, this rule will be very clear and unambiguous for children, parents and teachers.

Australia also banned children’s use of social media

This decision of France has come at a time when efforts are being intensified in western countries to enact strict laws to protect children from the harm of social media.

In December last year, Australia passed a historic law, under which children under 16 years of age were banned from having accounts on social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Facebook.

A few days before Macron’s announcement, the British government had also said that it was considering several options to keep children safe online, including banning social media for children under 16 years of age.

User will have to prove age

In France, this proposal is being led by Laure Miller, MP from Macron’s party Renaissance. He said that currently there is no proper age verification on social media platforms.

Any person can easily create an account by entering their birthday. The government wants to make real age verification strictly mandatory on platforms under the European Digital Services Act. This would mean that the user would have to prove whether he is above 15 years of age or not.

Laure Miller acknowledged that there are always ways to get around the rules, but said that at least concrete steps should be taken to protect children from harm online.

Benefited from ban in Australia

A big impact has been seen after such a ban in Australia. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said that about 47 lakh social media accounts related to children under 16 years of age have been closed or removed.

He told CNN that the government took this step because children were being harmed by social media and there were continuous demands from parents and the children themselves that they should “just be allowed to be children.”

Just before the ban came into effect, Albanese urged Australian teenagers to take up a new sport, learn a musical instrument or read that book that has been sitting on the shelf for a long time.

Book became the reason for social media ban in Australia American social psychologist Jonathan Height’s book The Anxious Generation, published in 2024, is also considered a major reason for bringing this law in Australia.

It has been argued in this book that social media is harming the mental health of children. After reading the book, the wife of the Chief Minister of South Australia told her husband that “something has to be done about this.” After this, a draft law was made at the state level, which later turned into a national level campaign.

The order was not implemented in India

In India too, the Delhi High Court had passed an order in the KN Govindacharya case in August 2013 that minor children cannot join social media. The court had then said that minor children cannot join social media platforms and it is the responsibility of the companies to verify the age properly.

The High Court believed that social media can become a threat to the mental health, education and safety of children. Therefore, platforms should ensure that children under 18 years of age do not use social media without parental permission.

However, despite this order it was never strictly implemented at the ground level. Neither social media companies implemented an effective age verification system nor any concrete monitoring system was created by the government. The result was that children easily created social media accounts by entering wrong age and this order remained limited to papers.