‘Will the bird protect our children?’ asks France’s Macron. Elon Musk replies

French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday asked new Twitter Inc. owner Elon Musk a question as he invited countries and firms to sign up for Children Online Protection Laboratory, an initiative to shield minors from harmful internet content. Macron, in a series of tweets, stressed the need to be more efficient in taking down harmful internet content to protect children.

Announcing the launch of the laboratory, Macron tweeted, “To protect our children on the Internet, we need to better verify user age, better detect and stop sexual predators, and better identify and address bullying. We need to be more efficient in taking down content,” Macron said.

“France, Estonia, New Zealand, Amazon, Dailymotion, Meta, Microsoft, Alphabet, Snap, TikTok and Qwant have signed up. All those who are willing should join us!” he added.

In another tweet, the French president waved at Elon Musk and asked, “Will the bird protect our children?”, in an apparent query about Twitter’s willingness to join the initiative.

To this, Musk said, “Absolument”

The Children Online Protection Laboratory will explore, promote, develop and evaluate solutions aimed at improving the safety of minors in the digital environment.

“The Laboratory will start as a coalition of the willing, with the immediate outcome of breaking down existing silos between governments, civil society organizations and private companies operating in the digital environment. The process governance as described in the Annex will be refined throughout the first year of operation,” Macron’s office said in a statement.

The participants of the laboratory agree to share knowledge, information, practice and expertise by engaging with each other and with other non-governmental organizations, companies and researchers to develop new initiatives and build upon existing ones to move toward more efficient policies and best practice that more effectively support and protect children.