French President Emmanuel Macron has been the global leader in promoting a ban on social media for kids, consistently welcoming countries that propose such measures with a “thanks for joining the movement” tweet. That includes Canada, which received its congratulatory tweet after a ban was included in Bill C-34. As I argued last month, however, I believe the Canadian ban is vulnerable to constitutional challenge on at least two fronts: freedom of expression, since blocking an entire cohort of Canadians from accessing information and expressing themselves on social media infringes Section 2(b) of the Charter, and privacy, since enforcing the ban will require millions of Canadians to verify their age to use social media services with the promised safeguards nowhere in place when the ban takes effect. Last week, France became the first major jurisdiction to have such a ban reviewed by its highest constitutional court, and it proceeded to strike down the law on substantially the same two constitutional concerns.
The French Parliament adopted a social media ban for kids under 15 on July 21st, with the law scheduled to take effect in September. But France’s system of constitutional review led the ban to be reviewed by the constitutional court, resulting in it being assessed and rejected before ever taking effect. Macron responded to the ruling by instructing Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu to rework the legislation to address the court’s concerns, with the government now targeting spring 2027 for a revised law.
Now the wealthy people will use the courts to ensure their profits under the guise of freedom. Liberalism 2.0. Freedom to fuck with childrens minds and destroy their future.
There is an easy solution to this problem that does not involve age verification. They can just start enforcing the law and going after the Tech Bros for collecting information on children which is already illegal. They have been collecting massive amounts of information about children without permission.
They have already broken the laws so many times. They have not gotten permission from parents and they know it. Giving up our freedom for their profits is a ridiculous solution to a problem they created.
They’ll do everything but hold social media companies to account for their editorial decisions (ie recommendation algorithms). All this would be very easily solved by banning algorithmic recommendations or at least mandating pluggable algorithms with a sane default that doesn’t prioritise rage bait over everything else.
I’ll just preload Mullvad DNS server (the max one) on my child’s phone when I’ll have one.
Of course it’ll be the cheapest used supported Pixel with Graphene with blocking sandboxed GMS install and only with an F-Droid client as the only source of install.
And of course he’ll get it when (s)he’ll be 15. Until then, a 15-yo laptop also with DNS level restrictions with way too locked down NixOS install must suffice.
Every social media platform, having a business model where the customer is the product, will put measures into place to avoid liability on the basis of hypocritical, age-dependent requirements (additional protections for children in case of the GDPR or DSA for example). So although ordering the platforms to “age”-gate might be unconstitutional, forcing them to choose between abandoning their business-model or age-gating their platform, likely results in the latter while bypassing said constitutional protections. But on a national level this should be considered a (temporary) win.
Fuck you, Macron
Hopefully the Canadian ban is successfully challenged. It pretty clearly violates kids’ Charter rights and is a total privacy infringement on adults, too.
So they want to ban kids from social media while addressing the concern of it being unconstitutional to prevent them from accessing the information that’s on social media. I have no doubt the privacy component will fall apart as soon as they can claim safeguards (that probably won’t work anyways) are in place.
Macron responded to the ruling by instructing Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu to rework the legislation to address the court’s concerns, with the government now targeting spring 2027 for a revised law.
spring 2027? it’s the end of his presidency. His ban is practically dead.
No it’s not. He can rush it through before the election. No political benefit for him, he can’t get reelected.
So now you can wonder why he wants it so bad.
No it’s not. He can rush it through before the election. No political benefit for him, he can’t get reelected.
He is not alone there. Others around him would have prior preoccupations. I agree with quadrature on this:
Pas content, Macron a déjà annoncé qu’il demandait au gouvernement de revenir avec une nouvelle loi interdisant les réseaux sociaux aux jeunes. Une annonce qui ne sera sans doute pas suivie d’effet, tant le calendrier parlementaire français est bouché d’ici aux élections présidentielles de 2027. Mais c’est par l’Union européenne que cette mesure pourrait revenir. La Commission européenne planche toujours sur une loi européenne pour instaurer une interdiction des réseaux sociaux aux jeunes.
Yeah because the nazis that he supported during the past 10 years and will get elected next are going to be much nicer
