Senator Robin Padilla made a resounding call for the swift passage of bills imposing tighter restrictions—if not outright bans—on children’s social media use following the fatal shooting at Ateneo de Zamboanga University (ADZU) early Tuesday that left two students dead, including the shooter.

Padilla believed that overexposure of children to social media is to blame for the alarming spate of school-related violence involving minors. 

Tuesday’s deadly gun attack came less than two months after the 22 June high school shooting in Tacloban—widely regarded as the deadliest school-related attack in the Philippines—that left three students dead and 20 others injured. The perpetrators are also minors, aged 14 and 15, and are enrolled in the same school. 

“Social media really has a huge impact on children…It is time for us to take action on [proposed] laws concerning our youth and social media, which can influence them to commit heinous acts,” Padilla said in a Facebook live. 

Several bills pushing for stricter regulations, if not a blanket ban, of social media use for minors have been filed in the Senate as a result of growing school-related violence.

Padilla’s Senate Bill 601 seeks to limit children’s interaction with and use of social media, establish a mandated screen time, and disable links redirecting them to external websites, among others. 

The bill was filed in July last year, but has remained pending at the committee level to date. 

Senate President Win Gatchalian, meanwhile, lowers the minimum age for the social media ban to 16. 

If passed into law, Gatchalian’s SB 2066 will make the Philippines the latest country to prohibit children under 16 from accessing social media, joining Australia, Indonesia, and Malaysia. 

The Senate leader demanded a thorough investigation into the ADZU school shooting and ordered the Department of Education and the local government of Zamboanga to provide immediate psychosocial support to distressed learners and school personnel affected by the incident.

“We need clear answers on how the shooter was able to obtain two firearms and how these firearms were brought into the school premises,” he pointed out. 

Senator Joel Villanueva, co-chair of the EDCOM2, said that aside from measures that strengthen safety and security in schools, the commission is also looking into possible legislation to tighten gun control and promote responsible firearms ownership, storage, and safety, to prevent children and other unauthorized persons from accessing firearms.

“These are difficult but necessary conversations, because no weapon should ever find its way into a classroom or be used to cut short the life of a child,” said Villanueva, who also heads the Senate committee on higher, technical and vocational education. 

School shootings are becoming an emerging trend despite the Philippines having relatively strict legal requirements for gun ownership under Republic Act 10591. 

Senator Risa Hontiveros said the Senate committee on women, children, family relations and gender equality, which she chairs, would continue its investigation on Thursday into whether the ADZU school shooting was also influenced or connected to nihilistic violent extremism, which was also being blamed for the Tacloban school shooting.

Zamboanga Mayor Khymer Olaso claimed that the minor suspect in the ADZU shooting was a “fanatic of Roblox.” 

During the previous hearing, authorities found that the recent spike in school-based extremist activity was traced to gaming platforms such as Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite, Call of Duty, and Free Fire.

An investigation by the Philippine National Police-Anti-Cybercrime Group has revealed that foreign extremists or “groomers” exploit chat boxes of these video games to connect with and manipulate minors and encourage them to engage in radicalization and violence. 

The usual targets are “loners” and introverted minors. 

“At this point, we cannot yet say whether this is linked to nihilistic violent extremism or other online communities,” Hontiveros said. 

Police said the suspect shot himself after he opened fire at a teacher—but missed— and a 10th grader. The incident occurred around 7:45 a.m. 

The DepEd earlier bared that the number of school-related violence incidents surged to unprecedented levels after the Tacloban shooting, which it characterized as “a phenomenon of copycat,” where students tend to mirror or copy the violent actions of one another.