French Constitutional Court and minors on social media: lawyer Polimeni speaks

"The sentence will cause a sensation for the wrong reason. Many will think: 'Have you seen? Social media cannot be banned'". Antonino Polimeni, lawyer expert in Internet law and president of Digital for Children, instead reads in the decision of the French Constitutional Court a principle destined to influence the European debate on access to platforms such as Instagram and TikTok: minimization. Effective protection of minors, he explains, must intervene on the concrete risks of social media by limiting the other rights involved as little as possible.

So the ruling doesn't close the road to bans?

"He says that we can intervene, even by banning, but precise criteria are needed. A generic article that brings together all under 15s and all platforms produces too many side effects. The needs of a 14-year-old, who also uses these tools to inform himself and communicate with peers, are different from those of an eight-year-old. You have to target exactly the problem you want to solve."

And is this where the minimization principle comes in?

"Exactly. When you introduce a rule to protect someone you have to minimize the compression of other rights. Even the platforms are very different from each other: if a company builds a truly safe and child-friendly environment, a general ban ends up treating it in the same way as a platform designed to create addiction".

What rules would be needed then?

"We need to act on structural safety. When a toy enters the European market it must comply with rigorous standards on materials and safety. The same criterion should apply to social media. We need to intervene on the algorithms built to retain the user, on the mechanisms that fuel anger and indignation and on the infinite scroll that can keep a person in front of the screen for hours".

Why is this discussion also about the power of states?

"Because much of sociality has moved into private infrastructures. In the past, schools, sports, associations and meeting places were spaces over which the State exercised a form of sovereignty. Today it is the platforms that decide what we see, when we see it and above all what we don't see. The legal basis for intervening exists; what is often missing is the concrete application of the rules. The challenge of the coming years will be to re-establish sovereignty over sociality in digital places which, in fact, are no longer ours".