French President Emmanuel Macron urges PM Modi to "join the club" by banning social media access for children under 15

French President Emmanuel Macron has urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to ban social media for children under the age of 15 years.

 Macron urges PM Modi to 'join the club'

At the India AI Impact Summit on Thursday, February 19, Macron shared that France is about to ban social media for children below 15 years.

"Children protection from AI is going to be France's G7 priority," the French President said, adding that Spain is going to take a similar step and urged PM Modi to "join the club".

On Tuesday, February 17, Indian IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said that the government is considering age-based restrictions on social media.

The French government has already considered banning TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and X (formerly Twitter). The ban could come into effect from September 26.

Notably, Australia has already banned social media for children under the age of 16.

Praising India's digital innovation and transformation, especially in the online payments scenario, Emmanuel Macron called the UPI "something that no other country could".

"Ten years ago, a street vendor in Mumbai could not open a bank account. No address, no papers, no access and today the same vendor accepts payments on his phone," he said.

"India built something that no other country in the world has built. A digital identity for 1.4 billion people. A payment system that now processes 20 billion transactions every month. A health infrastructure that has issued 500 million digital health IDs. Here are the results. They call it the India Stack Open Interoperable Sovereign," Macron added.

"I think we need a much stronger regulation on deepfakes. It is a problem growing day by day. Certainly there is a need for protecting our children and our society from these harms... we have initiated a dialogue with industry on what kind of regulation will be needed beyond what we already have," Vaishnaw said.

He added that the age-based restriction is something that has been accepted by many countries. "It was part of our DPDP... when we created this age-based differentiation on the content which is accessible to students and to young people. So that time itself, we took that forward-looking step," he added.

Also read: L&T partnering with NVIDIA to build India’s largest sovereign gigawatt-scale AI factory (startuppedia.in)