Children under 15 in France should be completely banned from using social media, and those between 15 and 18 years old should be subject to a nighttime “digital curfew,” a French parliamentary committee recommended, AFP reported.

The recommendations were presented in a report by the committee’s legislators after months of hearings involving families, social media executives, and influencers.

President Emmanuel Macron’s office has already indicated support for a ban for children and adolescents, following Australia’s move last year to draft a law imposing a similar ban for those under 16.

The committee was initially created in March to examine TikTok and its psychological effects on minors, following a 2024 lawsuit filed by seven families against the platform, accusing it of exposing their children to content encouraging suicide.

The lead author of the report, Laure Miller, stated that TikTok’s addictive design and algorithm “have been copied by other social networks.”

TikTok emphasized that the safety of young users on the app is its “highest priority.”

Géraldine, the mother of an 18-year-old who died by suicide, recounted that after her daughter’s death last year, she discovered self-harm videos that her daughter had posted and watched on TikTok. “TikTok did not kill our little girl, because she was by no means well,” said Géraldine, 52, who asked not to be identified by her last name.

However, she accused the platform of insufficient online oversight and of amplifying her daughter’s darker impulses.

Executives of TikTok, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, told the parliamentary committee that the app uses artificial intelligence moderation, which last year detected 98 percent of content violating platform rules in France.

For legislators, however, these efforts proved insufficient, and TikTok’s rules are “very easy to circumvent.” They found that harmful content continues to circulate on the app, and the algorithm effectively draws young users into cycles that reinforce such content.

The committee’s report proposes extending the ban for children under 15 to all users under 18 if platforms fail to comply with European laws over the next three years.

The recommendation for a “digital curfew” for users aged 15 to 18 would make social media inaccessible to them between 10:00 p.m. and 8:00 a.m. | BGNES