French President Emmanuel Macron – ANSA
If social media and other new media do not intend to clean up their approach towards younger people, then it is necessary to regulate, even by law, the use that the latter make of the digital universe. Among the great European nations, France confirmed itself yesterday at the forefront in the complicated and uncertain attempt to combat the new insidious addictions of young people towards screens and contents with devastating effects such as cyber pornography.
“Our children have become a commodity”, we can read in the harsh official report, at the request of President Emmanuel Macron, delivered yesterday by a prestigious ad hoc commission of experts which bluntly asks the executive to ban all access to screens for children who have not turned 3 years old, as well as the use of smartphones for under 11s, also including it during early adolescence. A crackdown that for the commission should resolutely start from the scholastic world. The report targets the so-called “hyperconnectedness” of minorsdenouncing in a detailed and scientifically documented way “the consequences for their health, their development, their future”.
The experts say they are “shaken” by the range of deceptions «strategies for capturing children’s attention» pursued unscrupulously by numerous content carriers, without substantial corrective interventions by access providers and other more systemic bodies. These are strategies used to “lock children in a relationship with screens, to control them, push them back, monetize them” by colonizing their attention.
Among the harmful effects of screens, sleep disorders stand out in terms of frequency, alongside obesity induced by an increasing sedentary lifestyle. Among already “vulnerable” young people, the use and abuse of social media is also among the proven causes of anxiety and depression. Particular alarm is then expressed for exposure to violent and pornographic content.
Children between 3 and 6 years old, the report underlines, should have “strongly limited” access to screens, only to enjoy “educational quality content”, in any case with the accompaniment of at least one adult. Furthermore, smartphones and televisions should disappear from maternity hospital wards, but also from nursery schools and nursery schools.
Very stringent, at least compared to behaviors that have become almost ordinary, are the recommendations for early adolescence: the use of a portable telephone only after the age of 11, but without the Internet, which can only be integrated from the age of 13. For social networks accessible from smartphones, however, the green light is only available from 15 years of age, also limiting itself only to “ethical” social networks, which concretely apply ethical rules.
The public authorities should then invest in one targeted all-out fight against so-called “predatory” services, like those that push kids to incessantly ingest new automatically activated videos. Among the suggested ways, a more intuitive setting of the parameters, such as the control functions reserved for parents.
Professionals in the digital sphere, the report insists, “do not have child protection as their priority”, but the expansion of one «capture economy» of the attention of the youngest, just as many parents find themselves displaced in the meantime.
The government intends to move forward, as Prime Minister Gabriel Attal explained yesterday, for whom public schools must begin by “sweeping in front of their doors”. The executive will therefore support a bill on the matter which has already been filed by the two neo-Gaullist deputies Annie Genevard and Antoine Vermorel-Marques.
