We’re currently two weeks into January, which is about the point when most people drop off on their New Year’s Resolutions. Reducing screen time has become a much more popular goal in recent years, and despite my best efforts (deleting TikTok, removing Instagram from my phone’s home screen), even I have struggled to regain hold of my attention as soon as that first short form video starts playing. This is even more challenging given the fact that I’ve been working on some exciting new things soon to come on our Instagram account, which means I’ve had to do a lot of—ahem—“research.”
We just published a guide from Valentine Marchou on the planned social media ban in France for children under the age of 15, inspired by Australia’s recent passing of a similar ban for those under 16. It’s made me think a lot about what would have happened if I’d had access to apps like this as a teenager—all I had in high school was a Facebook account on a shared desktop computer, which I mostly used to see what my classmates were up to, and post grainy photos of me and my friends at the Cherry Hill Mall. My brain feels scrambled enough these days as a full-on adult, so I’m glad I didn’t spend my formative years swiping through brainrot memes and AI slop.
I was interested to see how social media usage compared between France and the U.S., however, since social media to me feels like a deeply American concept. (Eyes on you, Emily.) In fact, I was surprised to learn that France has 77.2% social network penetration (percentage of users out of total population), which is actually higher than the U.S. at 73%, though it tails far behind countries like Saudi Arabia (111.2%), the UAE (109.7%), South Korea (95.4%), and Singapore (90.6%). This also puts it on par with Australia, at 77.7%. (In case you’re wondering, those 100+ numbers come from people with multiple user accounts.)
In terms of the most popular social media platforms, there wasn’t much deviation from the U.S., but preferences skewed slightly towards chat-based apps instead of content-based ones. While TikTok is certainly favored by French people between the ages of 12 and 17, and Instagram is popular among 18- to 34-year-olds, Facebook and Facebook Messenger actually turned out to be the most popular among French people aged 25 to 34. France also has one of the largest communities of Snapchat users in the world, with French minors between the age of 12 and 17 spending over half of their 116 monthly internet hours on Snapchat and TikTok (per a 2024 ARCOM survey).
And let’s not forget that it was the French who developed BeReal, which became briefly popular in 2022 as a sort of anti-social media app, on which people were forced to share authentic, unfiltered photos of their day-to-day lives thanks to timed posting prompts.
So perhaps there is hope that a French social media ban will encourage more young people to move away from content and towards communication. Or at least push them back to more old school forms of wasting time, like spending all weekend binging a new TV show…
