Can Singapore protect teens on social media without a ban? Seeking answers across borders
Teenagers are beating the social media ban in Australia, while Malaysia’s approach has raised privacy concerns. CNA’s Talking Point sees how the restrictions are playing out while a different playbook takes shape in Singapore.
Wong Yi Lim, a 14-year-old beauty influencer in Malaysia, showing Talking Point host Diana Ser how she films a product video on TikTok.
New: You can now listen to articles.
This audio is generated by an AI tool.
Read a summary of this article on FAST.
Get bite-sized news via a new
cards interface. Give it a try.
Click here to return to FAST
Tap here to return to FAST
FAST
SINGAPORE/SYDNEY/KUALA LUMPUR: “I can guarantee,” a teenager told his peers, “no matter how many restrictions (the authorities) put in place, we’ll somehow find a way to bypass (them).”
It is a viewpoint the authorities themselves have heard over the past couple of months during focus group discussions as Singapore considers how best to regulate children’s access to social media.
At one of the discussions among youths aged 13 to 35, the same teen thought there should be “full access” from age 13 onwards. Another said the government could “give guidelines” to parents to implement at home.
As Talking Point host Diana Ser joined their group, none sounded confident about the enforceability of restrictions. Said one boy: “There’s only so much (the government) can do.”
Guess Word
Crack the word, one row at a time
Buzzword
Create words using the given letters
Mini Sudoku
Tiny puzzle, mighty brain teaser
Mini Crossword
Small grid, big challenge
Word Search
Spot as many words as you can
Yet the pressure on policymakers continues to build up.
One in six young people aged 10 to 24 show signs of problematic social media use, associated with issues such as depression and anxiety. About one in five youths aged 15 to 35 have reported being cyberbullied.
While Singapore is now deciding how to protect its youth — with plans to legislate stronger safeguards early next year, Minister for Digital Development and Information Josephine Teo said this past week — some countries have already acted.
They include Australia, which became the world’s first country to ban access for under-16s to social media last December, and Malaysia, which implemented its restrictions in June.
Have the laws been successful and what does life look like for the teens living under them? Ser visited both countries to find teenagers making their way back to social media and the measures raising problems of their own.
Are bans the best solution, or are there other ways to keep children safe, Talking Point asks in a two-part special as the difficulty of protection becomes clear.
WATCH PART 1: Should children under 16 be banned from social media? (23:00)
A BAN WITH GAPS
Back in September 2024, Kelly O’Brien’s daughter, Charlotte, had been bullied at school for a couple of years, which eventually escalated online. According to O’Brien, the last message her 12-year-old received was, “you’re fat, you’re ugly, go kill yourself”.
She found her daughter’s suicide note the next morning. Asked if Charlotte would still be alive without social media, she answered: “Yeah.”
Eight weeks later, the girl’s parents were in Canberra, meeting the Australian prime minister and hoping to garner bipartisan support for raising the legal age for social media to 16.
“Having already lost everything, I thought there was nothing to lose to fight for other kids in Charlotte’s name,” said O’Brien.
What followed was that under-16s were barred from 10 social media platforms, with hefty fines for platforms that do not take reasonable steps to prevent under-16s from having accounts.
When the law was passed, though, Kelly did not feel happiness. “You can’t get your child back, but it’s (a) relief that other people might,” she said.
“(The ban) is for … the next generation who’d just know this life to be normal — to not want 10,000 likes or 800 followers.”
That hope may be aspirational. A study by Australia’s eSafety Commissioner found that 81.5 per cent of under-16s were using social media in March, compared to 85.9 per cent before the ban.
“Nothing really changed for me. I’m still on all of the platforms,” said Alyssia, 14, who had “done (her) lashes” and worn lip gloss the day she scanned her face, which was enough for her to complete the age verification.
Michael, 13, has seen his friends exploit the same loophole. They would “look left, look right” and “suck in their cheeks” to look older.
When the scan could not be beaten, teens found other ways around it, such as by switching devices and logging into a new account. Some of them got help from their parents, according to Michael.
“The ban has failed,” said Alyssia’s mother, Wendy Chang, who herself got locked out of Instagram when the ban took effect and she had to take a picture of herself for the facial estimation checks.
“For a whole week, I was banned,” she said, “but not Alyssia!”
A government-commissioned age assurance trial had tested more than 60 technologies and concluded that age verification could be done effectively. So, what has gone wrong?
Not the technology, according to Andrew Hammond, who was the trial’s deputy project director. He pointed to flaws in the implementation such as the lack of an age buffer.
His team’s report recommended that platforms perform another check on anyone who gets a borderline pass, as testing for age assurance at 16 — when appearances change “quite regularly” — is “quite hard”, he said.
He thought it likely that someone like Alyssia was let “straight through” because there was no buffer mechanism on the platform.
In the case of Chang, he suggested that lighting, such as “too much light”, or a “variety of … scenarios” might have caused the inaccurate estimation of her age.
The failure he sees happening is that “people just aren’t getting asked to verify their age that often”.
To sign up on “nine out of the 10 platforms”, he said, it is enough for users to state that they are 16 or older, and “away you go”.
Australian authorities have responded. After flagging potential enforcement action against five platforms in March — Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube — for non-compliance with the law, the government has moved to almost double the maximum fine for breaches.
It is set to increase from A$54.6 million (US$39.1 million) to A$99 million.
A fine is triggered when it is proven in court that a platform is not doing enough to comply with the ban. To make that case easier to build, the government is also giving its internet regulator greater power to compel internal records and emails from companies.
WATCH PART 2: Australia banned children from social media. Why are they still getting in? (22:54)
While the government has focused on tightening enforcement, Noah Jones, now 16, thinks the ban is “a terrible idea”. He is one of two teens challenging the legislation in Australia’s High Court.
He said it fails to address the root problem: the “bad, harmful content” on platforms. “They’re not getting rid of that content,” he added. “A vulnerable 17-year-old … is still exposed.”
Instead of a ban, he called for a different form of protection: social media education in schools, greater parental guidance and companies prioritising the removal of explicit content.
He put the odds of winning the case at “50-50”. Even if they lose, they will continue the fight, he said. “We still want kids to be safer online, and they’re not safer online with a failed blanket ban.”
THE PRICE OF PROTECTION
In Malaysia, under-16s are barred from having an account on social media platforms with at least eight million users. While this took effect in June, these platforms have a six-month grace period to remove the accounts of existing under-16 users.
The law grew out of the same problem Singapore and Australia must confront. Between January and Oct 1 last year, the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission received 35,781 cyberbullying-related complaints, or just over 130 cases a day.
There has also been a rise in other harmful content, such as online gambling, scams, child pornography and grooming.
It may explain why a Family First study this year found that 77 per cent of Malaysian parents supported a ban, the highest proportion in 15 countries surveyed.
Wong Yi Lim’s parents are no exception, even though the 14-year-old beauty influencer has built a following of nearly 20,000 on TikTok since she started in August 2024, picking up sponsorships from over 20 brands.
Her father, Jeff Wong, called Malaysia’s new age limit the “right move” as not everyone has the “time to pay attention to a child’s safety when using social media”.
“Children mightn’t be able to make decisions yet,” he said. “They’ll think many things are good and well-intentioned. But as adults, we must do some filtering.”
Yi Lim sees it differently. The ban will strip away a large part of her fan base, which is mostly under-16s. It would also be “hard to get followers in the future”, she said. “It’s unfair.”
Seah Lu Sean, chief operating officer of online parenting platform Makchic, has other concerns. She cited, for example, Malaysia’s approach to checking identity.
While most countries like Australia allow a range of age-verification methods, Malaysia requires users to scan a government-issued document such as MyKad, an identity card with biometric data. The card can also be used for financial transactions.
Seah has always told her two children not to share their address, school or last name online. But now registration information “is being put in the hands of platforms”, she fretted.
The question of data privacy was one that Ser raised with Eneng Faridah Iskandar, deputy managing director of development for the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission, the regulatory body overseeing the restrictions.
Eneng Faridah pointed to the government’s “data minimisation policy”, where platforms verifying age can collect only a birth date and nothing more. Companies must “dispose (of) that information once the account is verified”, she said.
In this way, privacy and age verification can coexist, she argued. “It’s not a trade-off.”
But for Seah, the authorities’ assurance that personal data will be protected does not suffice. “The intentions are there,” she said. “But in actuality, sometimes these leaks can happen.”
Data privacy is not her only worry. Her 14-year-old son told her that under-16s will probably “move to another platform” that is “currently not implementing all these checks”.
Seah already had safeguards such as Family Centre and Family Pairing set up on Instagram and TikTok. “Now I have to also monitor (new platforms), and I don’t really know whether they have enough parental controls,” she said.
Parents are not the only ones having to take on more responsibility. So too must the companies with at least eight million users, which are now automatically subject to Malaysia’s licensing framework.
They must comply with local laws by removing harmful content in a timely manner and blocking under-16s from registering new accounts, or face fines.
Eneng Faridah compared social media platforms to manufacturers, who must “ensure that their product is safe” rather than shift the onus for safety onto users. “We’re not painting … platforms (as) the enemy. We want to work with them,” she said.
We want to hold them (to) a higher level of accountability.”
While Malaysia’s legislation appears stricter than Australia’s, she has heard that some under-16s are able to register new accounts, so it is early days to judge the effectiveness and impact. “This is going to be a long journey,” she said.
LISTEN: From kids to adults, how do we keep social media use in check?
REDESIGN, RATHER THAN A BAN?
Back in Singapore, Carol Soon, deputy head of the National University of Singapore’s communications and new media department — who has spent years studying how governments and platforms manage online harm — thinks there is “no way a complete ban can work”.
“Users who are underage can easily borrow the IDs of someone who’s older and start an account,” she cited.
She also has her doubts about how far licensing can go.
“Are governments really going to strike off their licences?” she asked. “You’re talking about everyone not being able to use a social media platform, including adults, micro-entrepreneurs, small (and) medium-sized enterprises who need social media to eke out a living.”
The priority should be to explore what can “realistically” be done to make platforms safer for children, said Soon, who would start by setting “clear red lines” around bullying and content that promotes self-harm, suicide and sexual abuse.
Once the boundaries are made clear, she thinks there is room to discuss how platforms can “effectively mitigate” children’s exposure to such content.
Singapore’s legislative plans could possibly include a daily time limit for teens on social media and raising the minimum access age to 18 on platforms that do not comply with the safeguards, Teo told the media.
Limiting the time children spend on social media is something Soon also thinks the platforms must address by looking into their “addictive features”.
Infinite scrolling and autoplay, for example, are there to attract traffic and get users to spend “as much time as possible on the platforms”.
“These are design features that are deliberately incorporated into the platform,” she noted. “If they can be introduced, they can be tweaked.”
It could be said the platforms have a public responsibility to fulfil so that the millions of people on their sites are safe.
Ultimately, however, as they are profit-making companies whose business model centres on the number of users and engagement time, they “need a certain nudge” — a financial one — “to do what they’re supposed to do”, said Soon.
If more regulators round the world passed laws governing the companies’ actions, they would face greater pressure to comply so as not to “incur losses through fines”, she added.
For now, Singapore’s playbook is looking different from the restrictions in countries like Australia and Malaysia.
“We may not be stopping all kids from having their own social media accounts,” Ser observed. “Rather, we’re hoping to change the way social media platforms function for these kids.”
Watch this Talking Point special here: Part 1 and Part 2. The programme airs on Channel 5 on Thursdays at 9.30pm.
LISTEN: Social media changes in Singapore for the young; all for naught … if parents scroll away
Source: CNA/dp
Sign up for our newsletters
Get the CNA app
Stay updated with notifications for breaking news and our best stories
Get WhatsApp alerts
Join our channel for the top reads for the day on your preferred chat app
Get bite-sized news via a new
cards interface. Give it a try.
Click here to return to FAST
Tap here to return to FAST
FAST
