A newly enacted ban on social media for children under 15 years of age in France has put a spotlight on the multitude of dangers that minors face when they are given access to the internet. Experts say that parents must be increasingly vigilant and highly involved in making sure that their children are not exposed to online predators and harmful content in a world increasingly underpinned by soulless artificial intelligence.

Last week, France became the first European nation to outlaw the use of social media sites for minors under 15 following a landslide 279-81 Parliament vote in favor of the legislation. According to CBS News, the new law prevents children under 15 “from creating new social media accounts on platforms such as TikTok and Snapchat” starting in September and will also block existing accounts starting in January 2027. In addition, the law will ban high schoolers from having phones in school starting next year.

As has been observed in countries like Australia, the effectiveness of blanket bans on minors’ access to social media has been mixed, with critics noting that enforcing the measures is extremely difficult. “We have already seen in Australia that a social media ban can easily be circumvented, with some children even bypassing age gates by drawing on fake moustaches,” legal and policy expert Maya Thomas told CBS. Other ways teens routinely get around age blocks are by “using VPNs, fake dates of birth or accounts created by older friends or family members.”

Still, there is little dispute that the proliferation of phones with internet access to 24/7 social media platforms has drastically impacted the mental health of minors. Researchers like Jean Twenge from San Diego State University first began sounding the alarm in 2017 after she discovered rates of depression, anxiety, and loneliness exploding among young people around 2012. “Smartphones were used by the majority of Americans around 2012, and that’s the same time loneliness increases. That’s very suspicious,” she noted at the time. Since then, rates of anxiety and depression among children and adolescents have only increased further.

As experts like Donna Rice Hughes, president and CEO of Enough Is Enough, point out, mental health maladies are far from the only dangers that heavy social media use has incurred on young people.

“Anytime a child has an internet-connected device — that’s a smartphone, a laptop, a gaming console, you name it — they’re connected to all the good and all the bad, and the bad and evil people are out there looking for vulnerable kids,” she warned during “Washington Watch” Monday. “[T]hey are scouting and fishing online for vulnerable kids. So this is really important.”

Hughes continued, “[S]ocial media was never designed for kids. It was designed for 18-year-olds and up. You remember when Facebook first started? It was for college kids and up to connect. So just the design of these platforms is not safe. They were not designed with safety in mind. And so now you’ve got AI added to this.”

Hughes went on to highlight how her organization is providing parents with resources to protect their children. “[W]hat we’ve done at Enough Is Enough is [create a] one-stop shop for you. We did this for gaming platforms, AI chat companions, [and] internet service providers.”

Hughes further argued that federal, state, and local governments also have a role to play in protecting minors. “[In] Florida, they banned social media for kids under 16. … But there’s not a federal law yet, and I doubt there ever will be because of the lobby of the Big Tech community to fight any kind of regulation in the United States. … [T]his study just came out [showing that] 11 of the Big Tech companies — AI, social media, all of them — spent [over] $41 million in the first six months of this year lobbying the federal government to not pass any of the legislation that’s sitting there waiting to get passed to hold these companies accountable.”

Hughes also emphasized that AI is causing additional mayhem due to a lack of regulation and increasingly sophisticated capabilities. “It’s a very dangerous world right now because AI is not regulated and the AI companies are part of this big lobbying effort, even lobbying the White House to not put any kind of guardrails around AI. So what we are telling parents is … you have to recognize that, yes, sometimes ChatGPT and Claude can be used for good reasons. But these chatbots are also digital enablers, and they’re digital spies. They are collecting data on your child and on you, by the way, to actually program their algorithms to make them more sympathetic and more sycophant … to mirror what, for instance, a child is saying.”

“There was a study that came out last year that one in three kids prefer the companionship of their AI chatbot over a real person,” Hughes underscored. “This is very dangerous. And we’ve seen suicides happen because in many cases, these chatbots are actually writing suicide notes for these kids that are depressed. So we’ve got to be very, very careful. We do need the government to regulate, we need guardrails around all this technology, and we need to realize we’re in a war.”

Hughes concluded by insisting that parents “need to be the first line of defense. And we have the tools to help make navigating the online world easier for you.”