Report from TechRadar
In Brief – As France continues forward with legislation to impose an age threshold of 15 for social media use in the country, Anne Le Hénanff, the Minister Delegate for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Affairs, said that the government is considering restrictions on virtual private networks (VPNs) to help enforce the social media ban. She described VPNs as the “next topic” to address as they could allow minors to bypass age-based restrictions, as seen in the UK, where age-based online rules led to a surge in VPN use. However, VPNs are also widely used for online privacy and critics argue that restricting their use or requiring users to register them with authorities risks authoritarian overreach.
Context – France’s National Assembly approved the legislation to ban children under 15 from accessing social media by a vote of 116–23. The measure is strongly backed by President Emmanuel Macron. The proposal, which is now before the French Senate, requires online platforms to use EU-compliant age-verification systems and extends France’s current student smartphone ban to include high schools. Online age limits and related age checks are on the march globally. Social media age thresholds are reportedly being considered in at least 10 other EU member states. Australia’s landmark 16-year-old threshold for social media accounts is now months into the implementation phase. The explosion of age-based online content laws is highlighting how users often try to employ VPN technology services to circumvent local limits. VPN usage reportedly spiked in the UK last summer in response to the Online Safety Act and in Australia with their social media age law. Officials in the UK and in several US states trying to impose age-based social media rules are calling for legal restrictions on VPNs to stymie their use in online regulation work-arounds. VPN use is also at the heart of recent global content takedown orders X received from an Australian regulator and Canadian judge, both ruling that since local users could employ a VPN to circumvent a local online content restriction, X needed to block the offending content globally.