PARIS — French authorities are seriously considering restricting public access to some of the world’s most popular social media sites to prevent children from accessing pornography and to stop them being radicalized.

French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday said he wants to ban social media for under-15s in France “in the coming months” if there’s no progress on EU-wide measures, after the murder of a teaching assistant in a high school that morning.

Earlier, Digital Minister Clara Chappaz’s office told POLITICO it is considering designating websites such as Bluesky, Mastodon and Reddit — all of which allow the distribution of adult content — as porn platforms, obliging them to implement stringent age verification requirements under new French rules that came into effect Saturday.

“Our focus is age verification for any platform that distributes or enables the sharing of pornographic content,” Chappaz’s office said in an email.

Failure to comply could see sites fined, delisted from search engines or blocked completely.

Chappaz revealed last week that Elon Musk’s X was on the verge of receiving such a designation, which her office later confirmed.

But attempts in France to formally classify social media sites as pornographic ones could be legally tricky, experts say. Under the European Digital Services Act, it’s up to the European Commission, not individual EU countries, to regulate “Very Large Online Platforms” (VLOP) like X. The DSA gives VLOPs some discretion over how to manage systemic risks like exposing minors to adult content or disseminating illegal content.

Chappaz’s office said a legal review in France related to the case is underway.

This is not the first time regulators have gone after X for allowing porn on the platform. Tanzania recently blocked the social media giant over the presence of pornographic content, and last year Belgium’s media regulator expressed concerns that Musk had turned X into a porn website.

Macron’s government, previously an ally of Big Tech, has in recent years moved to more stringently regulate social media apps, with its push for a Europe-wide lower age limit of 15 for social media gaining traction in Brussels.

But in the immediate absence of action at the European Union level to keep children off adult content platforms, France has been going its own way. The results so far have been mixed.

While some porn websites have complied, others such as xHamster, XVideos or XNXX have refused to do so and could see penalties from France’s communications regulator, Arcom, on Wednesday.

Arguably the biggest player in the adult content space, Aylo Freesites, last week chose to block access to its products in France in protest against the age verification measures. The company, which owns Pornhub, Redtube and YouPorn, argued the new rules were “dangerous” and “potentially privacy infringing.”

Meanwhile, the European Commission is working on its own solution for age verification, with France one of five countries set to trial it. The Commission separately opened DSA investigations into major porn platforms like Pornhub over age verification.

Thomas Regnier, a spokesperson for the Commission, said several provisions of the DSA applied in this case and oblige X to take “appropriate risk mitigation measures — including on pornographic content.”

“We are of course carefully monitoring X’s compliance with the DSA,” Regnier said, but did not specify whether the Commission is investigating the dissemination of adult content on X.

The Commission in December 2023 opened a probe into whether X was violating the DSA but provisions on minors protection have not been explicitly identified, unlike investigations into Meta and TikTok. In 2024 the Commission accused X of breaking the rules on several counts.

X, Reddit and BlueSky didn’t respond to requests for comment on this story.

X says that users under 18 or those without a birth date on their profile are not able to view pornographic content. The platform notes that adult content creators should adjust their settings so explicit videos are labeled. Users can also report porn, it said.

But as with most other social media platforms, users can also set their birth dates as whatever they want without verification, allowing, say, a 14-year-old to pretend to be older than they are.

Joshua Berlinger contributed to this report.