Move comes as a growing number of countries are rolling out measures to limit children's exposure to digital platforms.

Malaysia plans to ban social media for users under the age of 16 starting from next year, joining a growing list of countries choosing to limit access to digital platforms due to concerns about child safety.

Communications Minister Fahmi Fadzil said on Sunday the government was reviewing mechanisms used to impose age restrictions for social media use in Australia and other nations, citing a need to protect youths from online harms such as cyberbullying, financial scams and child sexual abuse.

“We hope by next year that social media platforms will comply with the government’s decision to bar those under the age of 16 from opening user accounts,” he told reporters, according to a video of his remarks posted online by local daily The Star.

  • QuentinCallaghan@sopuli.xyz
    16·
    2 days ago

    Similar discussion is happening also here in Finland. However, if something is to be banned from kids, it has to be clearly defined. What is considered “social media”? Is it platforms like Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat? Does it include messaging apps like WhatsApp or Signal? Most of this discourse is also based on works of Jonathan Haidt, Greg Lukianoff and Jennifer Twente, all of which have received a fair share of criticism. There is also a considerable amount of a classic moral panic sprinkled in.

    Alice Marwick, an academic that has extensively studied kids, technology and social media, was on Taylor Lorenz’s podcast earlier this year. Her organization published a report, where the following is stated:

    We strongly believe that reform of social platforms and regulation of technology is needed. We need comprehensive privacy legislation, limits on data collection, interoperability, more granular individual and parental guidance tools, and advertising regulation, among other changes. Offline, young people need spaces to socialize without adults, better mental health care, and funding for parks, libraries, and extracurriculars. But rather than focusing on such solutions, KOSA and similar state bills empower parents rather than young people, do little to curb the worst abuses of technology corporations, and enable an expansion of the rhetoric that is currently used to ban books, eliminate diversity efforts in education, and limit gender affirming and reproductive care. They will eliminate important sources of information for vulnerable teenagers and wipe out anonymity on the social web. While we recognize the regulatory impulse, the forms of child safety legislation currently circulating will not solve the problems they claim to remedy.

    Dr. Candice Odgers is also a vocal critic of Haidt, accusing him of cherry picking with a pre-made agenda in mind:

    The cross-country comparisons, you know, they’re they’re often a starting point to see whether there might be something interesting correlationally going on, but it’s a very slippery place to start and I think you know, unless you start with the pretty clear hypothesis about what should explain those differences, if you’re just looking at trend lines and then going backwards and starting to fill in an explanation, it’s hard to follow where it goes and whether or not we’re just fitting these lines to our existing theories, but I’ll leave it.

    • themurphy@lemmy.ml
      6·
      2 days ago

      If it was me, I would suggest that everything where you can post stuff to a feed/on a profile is considered Social Media.

      Direct messaging is not. But if they implement other features into the app, like stories, it’s Social Media again.