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.
I guess many governments in the world need to try this to discover it doesn’t work. There’s tens of thousands of webpages world wide that kids can use for doing whatever it is they’re doing on social media, and governments won’t be able to find or block all of them - and the kids will just use whatever page isn’t banned. I wonder though what will happen when the governments get around to realizing their method doesn’t work, like when they have blocked site number 10,000 and site number 10.001 is up a day after. At some point they’ll go “aaargh this ain’t working”. Will they just give up and let kids use whatever pages they want or will they double down and maybe ban kids having smartphones? What CAN they even do that could work?