In late November of 2019, President of France, Emmanuel Macron, at an UNESCO event that focused on the “Rights of Children”, shared three key points, with the last concerning children’s access to pornography. The President led in with the problem, sharing that a child’s first exposure to pornography is 13 years of age, and made the statement regarding necessary online provisions that, “You don’t bring a child to a sex shop at the age of 13.” He next announced procedures for porn sites and Internet providers to follow to stop the flow of porn to children in France, and stated that we will be giving them “six months to come up with robust solutions” or “we’ll have a bill.”
The President shared provisions that sounded identical to the U.K.’s Age Verification bill that requires online pornographic websites to verify the age of visitors before making pornographic material available. He explained, “simply stating your age online is not sufficient authenticity”, and that age-verification should be “real and effective”. He also shared that the authority to implement the regulation would be given to the CSA, which is identical to the U.K. providing implementation authority to the BBFC. Both organizations monitor and rate television programming, much similar to the Motion Picture Association in the U.S.
It seems that with the U.K.’s law on pause, France is picking up the baton.
The President went on to say, “I want parental controls applied by default…or we will have a bill on automatic parental controls.” The President’s call for the default filtering of pornography is very similar to the former U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron’s speech at the NSPCC headquarters in London 6 years ago that led to the voluntary action of major Internet provider in the U.K. to provide better parental controls, though only one, Sky Broadband, elected to filter pornography as a default setting.
I don’t think there’s been such an open and authoritative stance against pornography by country leader as President Macron’s since Prime Minister Cameron. Below is the link to the video. At around 45 minutes the President goes into his third point on protecting children from pornography. I hope and pray the President continues his quest to see real solutions take effect in the great country of France. https://en.unesco.org/news/president-france-urges-protection-youth-online-unesco-celebration-30th-anniversary-convention