Australia is going where no country has gone before with the implementation of a ban on social media for children 16 years old and under.
With the enactment of the law, children in Australia can no longer create or access their accounts in 10 social media platforms, which include Facebook/Meta, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok.
The law seeks to protect the youth after a government-commissioned study saw that social media users aged 10-15 years were exposed to harmful content, which can have a negative impact on their well-being considering that algorithms are designed to increase screen-time exposure.
With this new law, many countries are eager to know the impact of these pioneering controls.
Other countries in Europe such as the UK and France have proposed similar bans while in our neighborhood, Malaysia and Singapore are considering banning social media for children as well.
In the Philippines there are several pending bills in both the Senate and the House of Representatives.
Senate bills in the 20th Congress that propose social media restrictions for children include SB 40, SB 595, and SB 601. Similar bills in the House include HB 6567, HB 6080 and HB 4383.
The Australia social media ban sets the age at 16 years old while the locally proposed regulation is more nuanced and can set the limit at 18 years old, which is the United Nations definition of a child.
In other bills, however, the limit is lower or tiered for the creation of social media accounts versus the maintenance of such accounts.
The need for regulation of the social media use of children is far more relevant and urgent for the Philippines.
While the data is not gradient enough, we need to consider that there are 91 million social media identities/users in the Philippines according to Meltwater Global Digital Report for 2025, which makes the country one of the largest online communities in the world.
While it is unclear how many Philippine social media users are actually below 18 years old, the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) survey, which covers Filipinos aged 10-64 years old, estimates 73.9 percent use the internet for social media.
Seeing the data and reading accounts of the psychological effects of excessive social media use, instituting a ban for children is a reasonable and urgent regulation. However, there are three issues we need to consider.
Firstly, social media use is pervasive across the demographics, which allows communication between adults and children.
We see this in schools where students and teachers coordinate and collaborate using social media channels and this may include parent communities as well. In this case, social media use by children can be productive.
If disconnected, it can be stressful for all users — including the adults in the room. However, there is a dark side as well given communities can be infiltrated by adults as well as children who have bad intentions, and this is part of what the social media ban is trying to address.
Secondly, the penalty in the proposed local bills is really not that much relative to those in Australia.
Fines for violating the regulation are meted out against the offending social media platform. The proposed fines range from P100,000 to P20 million (around US$338,000), which may sound like a lot.
But relative to what these social media platforms earn and Australia’s reported maximum fine for repeated violations, our proposed fines are miniscule and not really prohibitive.
The maximum fine in Australia is US$32 million (around P1.4 billion) while Meta earned US$62.4 billion in net profit in 2024 (around 15 percent of our GDP).
Lastly, the way we use social media is not all bad. Based on the survey of the Congressional Policy and Budget Research Department (CPBRD), the number of Philippine users that utilize the internet for learning and data search is well above the global average.
Children on social media can supplement their education journey via the internet but, unfortunately, there are also many distracting and disturbing content that are being pushed towards them.
There is the good, the bad, and the ugly with social media. A much more robust control framework that gives us time to teach youth and adults alike how to ethically and productively use social media is important.
What I would like to see is if we disconnect our under-18 users, we should also work towards reconnecting them using non-virtual platforms that support building long-lasting relationships within their communities.
Let us provide a safe environment for the children and teach them how to walk before allowing them to run on these powerful platforms.