In these times of fragmentation of political life, we must know how to rejoice in transpartisan agreements. This is particularly the case of the ban on social networks for those under 15, which has just been adopted by the deputies and senators of our country, on the eve of the summer break.
This law is a necessity of the first order. Anyone who despairs of seeing their children or grandchildren glued to their phone for hours on end, scrolling through videos lasting a few seconds, knows this. Anyone who knows the impacts of this overexposure on the brains of an entire generation knows this too. But teenagers are also aware of it, they who maintain a bittersweet relationship with their screens, from which they want to separate themselves without ever really succeeding.
After the law, collective awareness of the harms of this contemporary addiction must now be translated into reality. It is desirable that the means be implemented quickly to impose clear limits on companies which thought they could exploit without counting the “available brain time” of our adolescents. These companies will not fail to invoke alleged technical impossibilities, as did in their time the owners of pornographic sites, which the public authorities have demanded for several months that they be effectively inaccessible to under 18s. We will have to stand our ground and impose the law without trembling.
The politician, whose impotence and loss of credibility we regularly regret, has here a way of proving that he is not as weak as people say. With the ban on social networks for children under 15, the State, and through it all of us, finally has the opportunity to regain control over large digital companies.
