As children are growing up they need to be corrected if they did anything wrong. I won't say that social media is bad. Because it has advantages and disadvantages, and it can easily impact young children negatively. Social media is full of rumours monger, misinformation, and other things that could mislead a child. Social media is the best place to have beneficial knowledge and experience concerning certain things. Those countries must have their reasons for that sudden restrictions. Under 15 children are still young and need proper guidance, so parents must be extra careful about how they handle their lives and cases.
Parents are just one part of the process to protect children from unwanted online content. It is a collective mission with many collaborators like schools and civil society, with the partnership of the most important collaborator, the state. This decision in France that we are about to discuss looks so impressive but in my opinion it will solve nothing and can be considered as a run away from real responsabilities:
- Children at the age of 15 and under know very well how to bypass the ban and how to use social media anonymously. So why not apply a set rules to control the platforms themselves about what they allow to publish in their interfaces.
- Why not applying the same restrictions for sites showing pornographic content? Children shouln't be allowed to watch other types of content that is displayed everywhere not just in social media. Example reality shows in TV.
- Whom to blame if a children being caught using social media? The social media platforms or his parents? Or the government itself for not being seriously responsible?