As child social media bans spread across Europe and beyond, Estonia isn't having it. On Friday, the country's education minister said the bans won't "actually solve problems," while warning that the kids will find a way regardless. Although companies like Meta would love for you to believe it’s a fairy tale , social media addiction is associated with tangible negative repercussions for children. Studies show that its harms range from depression and anxiety to sleep deprivation and obesity. (The latter is from all the targeted junk food advertising.) On the other hand, teens can find community and support from social media. A growing list of countries looked at the negative data and concluded that the answer was to ban social media altogether for children. Although the age cutoff varies, legislation has been floated or enacted in Australia , Greece , France , Austria , Spain , Indonesia , Malaysia , the UK and Denmark — just to name a few. Estonia's education minister believes these countries are coming at the very real problem from the wrong angle. "The way to approach this, to me, is not to make kids responsible for that harm and start self-regulating," Kristina Kallas said at a Politico forum in Barcelona. She added that "kids will find very quickly the ways to go around and to still use social media." Instead, she said the responsibility lies with governments and corporations. "Europe pretends to be weak when it comes to big American and international corporations," she added. But she called that a "pretense," challenging the EU to "actually take this power and start regulating the big American corporations." To be fair, the EU regulates the tech industry more effectively than anywhere else in the world. But the point on childhood social bans stands. Another argument against the bans is that it’s a short path from the well-meaning to a more sinister erosion of basic freedoms. In February, France suggested that the next logical step after passing an under-15 social media ban would be to go after VPNs . After all, once you pass the ban, you need to enforce it — and that can mean snuffing out the tools children could use to work around it. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/estonia-is-the-rare-eu-country-opposing-child-social-media-bans-194620916.html?src=rss
America's Big Tech companies may soon learn that saddling up with Donald Trump doesn't tend to work out in the end . As the president sows chaos and distrust around the globe while taking aim at EU tech regulations, Europe is looking for ways to adopt its own alternatives. The latest example is France, which said it's dropping Microsoft Windows in favor of Linux. On Wednesday, France said ( via TechCrunch ) it plans to move its workstations from Windows to the open-source Linux. It's part of a broader movement across Europe toward digital sovereignty, aimed at reducing reliance on foreign tech — especially American and Chinese. Although homegrown alternatives aren't available in many areas, the EU seems prepared to wean itself off where it can. In January, France announced that it would move its videoconferencing from Zoom and Teams to the French-made Visio . As part of this week’s Linux announcement, France added that it would also migrate its health data to a new platform by the end of 2026. Since taking office, Trump has used tariffs and other measures to try to bully European nations into dropping their regulations on America's tech industry. In August, he vowed to "stand up to Countries that attack our incredible American Tech Companies." (The strange capitalizations are his, not ours.) His administration has described laws like the EU's Digital Services Act as "censorship" and "a tax." So far, Europe has stood firm. "I want to be very clear: our digital sovereignty is our digital sovereignty," European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said at the Munich Security Conference in February. "We have a long tradition in freedom of speech. Actually, the Enlightenment started on our continent." Christian Kroll, CEO of German search engine Ecosia, foresaw Europe's predicament soon after Trump's 2024 reelection. "We, as a European community, just need to make sure that nobody can blackmail us." He added that "if the US turned off access to search results tomorrow, we would have to go back to phone books." Granted, the guy is selling a European-made search engine, so his bias is clear. But the salience of his point stands. Giorgos Verdi, policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said the Trump administration's behavior underscores the need for Europe to break free. "Could the US use its dominance over AI chips, its dominance over cloud in Europe, its dominance over AI systems in order to exert more pressure?" Verdi asked CNN rhetorically in January. "In order to build more resilience for Europe… there is a geopolitical case for European innovations to emerge." This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/french-government-says-au-revoir-windows-bienvenue-linux-165407232.html?src=rss
