Macron and WHO Chief Warn Childhood Is Being Rewritten by Screens — But Bans Alone May Not Be Enough

French President Emmanuel Macron and WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned Wednesday that digital platforms are no longer just communication tools, but public health environments shaping how children learn, sleep, socialize and understand the world.

In a joint commentary published by Project Syndicate and the World Health Organization on July 1, Macron and Tedros argued that governments must move beyond “incremental adjustments” and treat children’s online lives as a health and development issue.

Their intervention comes as governments are moving quickly toward age restrictions. Australia’s under-16 social media ban took effect in December 2025. The United Kingdom says it plans to bar platforms from offering services to under-16s from spring 2027. Canada introduced legislation in June that could restrict access for children under 16 unless platforms meet safety standards. Indonesia has also moved to restrict under-16 access, with TikTok and YouTube reportedly deactivating 4.7 million child accounts.

The public health concern is not hypothetical. WHO Europe reported that problematic social media use among adolescents rose from 7% in 2018 to 11% in 2022, with girls more affected than boys, while 12% of adolescents were at risk of problematic gaming.

UN figures also show the scale of exposure: 82% of people aged 15 to 24 used the internet in 2025, while UNICEF has long warned that roughly one in three internet users globally is a child.

But the early evidence from Australia suggests bans may be easier to announce than enforce. A University of Newcastle study published in The BMJ found that more than 80% — and by some reporting 85% — of under-16s surveyed were still using social media three months after Australia’s ban took effect, often through fake accounts, private browsers or weak age checks.

That finding does not necessarily discredit regulation. It does, however, challenge the idea that age bans alone can solve a design problem. Australia is already moving to toughen enforcement, including doubling possible penalties for non-compliant platforms to A$99 million.

Macron and Tedros point to a broader problem: digital spaces are monetized to capture attention, not necessarily to protect development. Algorithms can amplify harmful content, targeted advertising can expose young users to risky products, and generative AI is now making abuse easier to produce and harder to police.

Child protection organizations are already documenting that shift. The Internet Watch Foundation said it assessed 8,029 AI-generated images and videos in 2025 as realistic child sexual abuse material, while UNICEF warned this year that AI-generated abuse imagery marks a major escalation in online risks to children.

The emerging policy question is therefore not simply whether children should be online. It is who designs the online world, who profits from it, and who is held responsible when children are harmed.

The Macron-Tedros argument is strongest when it moves beyond prohibition. Children need protection from exploitation, graphic content and addictive design, but they also need access to education, community and health information. For excluded or isolated young people, digital spaces can be a lifeline.

The lesson from Australia is that governments may be right to act, but wrong if they mistake a ban for a system. Effective protection will likely require age-appropriate design, independent research, enforceable platform accountability, privacy-preserving age assurance, digital literacy, parental support and youth participation.

In other words: the digital childhood debate is no longer about screen time alone. It is about whether governments can regulate a commercial environment that has become part playground, part classroom, part marketplace and part public health risk.

ONEST Take (Public)

Much of the current debate focuses on age limits, bans and financial penalties. Those measures may become part of the solution, but they cannot be the entire solution because they address the outcome rather than the system that produced it.

Social media platforms did not become addictive by accident. For years, they have invested enormous resources into understanding human behavior, employing psychologists, behavioral scientists, marketers and data specialists to maximize engagement. Notifications, personalized recommendations, endless scrolling, autoplay and algorithmically curated feeds are not random features — they are deliberate design choices intended to keep users returning and staying longer.

Think about it. If your phone never notified you that someone had liked your post or uploaded a new video, how often would you check it? If your feed showed random content instead of posts tailored to your interests, how long would you continue scrolling? Those mechanisms are powerful even for adults. For children and teenagers — whose brains are still developing and who are often searching for identity, belonging and answers — their influence can be far greater.

Many adults can probably remember what it felt like to be young, uncertain or isolated. In previous generations, those questions were answered by parents, teachers, books or close friends. Today, they are increasingly answered by recommendation algorithms whose primary objective is not child development, but user engagement.

This is why governments should not only regulate access to platforms but also require greater accountability for how those platforms are designed. If financial penalties simply become another cost of doing business for companies generating billions in revenue, little will fundamentally change. Sustainable progress will require the companies themselves to acknowledge that engagement cannot remain the overriding metric when children's health and development are at stake.

Recognizing that a problem exists is the first step toward solving it. The next step is ensuring that the systems shaping childhood are designed to serve children — not simply the business models built around capturing their attention.

And let’s be frank: social media has already played a major role in spreading propaganda, hatred and radicalizing content among adults. With new AI tools, bad actors now have faster access to systems that can turn engagement into indoctrination at scale.

That is why this debate cannot stop at children’s screen time or parental responsibility. It is also a security issue. I highly recommend my reporting from the UN Counter-Terrorism Conference, where officials discussed exactly this challenge — how extremist and malicious actors exploit digital platforms and AI — and what governments, technology companies and international institutions can do about it.

Exclusive: UN Counter-Terrorism Conference Turns to AI, But the Bigger Question Is Governance

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