Disney Deals, France Hops on the Ban Wagon, + Trump's AI Supremacy

The French Parliament is expected to debate a social media ban for anyone under 15, a move supported by President Emmanuel Macron. Lawmakers would also likely try to prohibit mobile phones in secondary schools.

• 🎙️ The move follows Australia’s under 16 social media ban which went into effect in December and South Korea’s mobile phone ban in classrooms. Look for more countries to follow suit in 2026.

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Meta updated its privacy policy on December 16, 2025, so they can use your “AI interactions to personalize content and ads recommendations.”

• 🎙️ As we cover in our Privacy/Security module in “Driver’s Training for the Online World,” nothing online is really free. Treat your data from your chatbot prompts as a protected asset. We don’t recommend Meta AI.

Disney and OpenAI announced a $1 billion three-year licensing agreement allowing Sora users to create AI-generated fan content in early 2026 “from a set of more than 200 animated, masked and creature characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars.” Disney sent a cease and desist letter to Google “alleging copyright infringement” the day before the announcement.

• 🎙️ Disney will also stream curated short-form content from select creators on Disney+. It’s like Disney’s $1.5 billion deal with Epic Games. Fans aren’t just consuming, they’re also creating content and marketing FOR Disney.

President Trump issued an executive order on December 11, 2025 framing AI innovation as a war to win. “We remain in the earliest days of this technological revolution and are in a race with adversaries for supremacy within it.”

• 🎙️ This order attempts to curb state AI laws (under threat of litigation and withholding of federal funds) in favor of a national framework that does not yet exist. As we said in July when the moratorium on state laws regulating AI was stripped from the “One Big Beautiful Bill” by a 99-1 Senate vote, recent failures to update 27-year old online privacy laws tell us passing federal AI regulation any time soon is fantasy.