Malaysia enforces ban on social media accounts for children younger than 16
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I am, however, all for banning personalised feeds, data collection, targeted ads, what amounts slot machines, and generally the poison these platforms spew.
What this will look like in practice I don't know. I am neither a lawyer, politician, nor do I work on these systems.
Thse are new "freedoms" we are going to enjoy in a little while.
If you actually haven't used social media recently then I get why you'd be confused, because back in the day Facebook had a chronological timeline of people you specifically added in. The way a modern social media recommender algorithms work is completely different. If you, for example, say "I want to hear everything that Bob has to say" by "subscribing" to Bob or whatever, you "might" see when Bob says something, or instead you "might" see Mary's post from the other side of the world that has some strangely aggressive opinions about someone the billionaire platform owner happens to hate.
Social media companies have decided by buddying up to the US administration that they get to decide what everyone around you sees or hears. If a couple of billionaires decide that they don't like phyzix5761 you might just get lynched by an angry mob. That's not gonna do much for your freedom, in-fact it's kind of the opposite.
- Instead of saying that a person may not install unsafe wall sockets, we can say that companies are not allowed to sell unsafe wall sockets. - Instead of saying that a person may not take any job they like, we can say that companies must provide workplace safety. - Instead of saying that people are not allowed to smoke or use social media, we can say that companies are not allowed to sell addictive products.
So it is a question of perspective where both viewpoints are valid.
And of course addictive is a scale from nicotine to deep fried chicken to infinite scroll. And then it is a question about the customer's ability to see through and make rational choices which of course depend on age, knowledge, existing alternatives etc. It is not that easy for a teenager to resist the works of thousands of engineers and data statisticians who are working on increasing retention.
So just saying that it should be allowed because of Free Will is to ignore all the complexities around it.
This is a dangerous mindset and precedent. It means that one day someone else will come along and have the ability to tell us what we can and can't do with our own children. If the next administration thinks it must be mandatory for every child to participate in social media for 4 hours every day now they have the legal and social precedent to impose something like that.
We shouldn't use government to force our own ideas and beliefs on others. Instead, we should set up boundaries that allow each individual to freely choose what they want for themselves and their families as long as it doesn't directly harm the freedoms of others.
To get any type of parental control on Minecraft took me the best part of a day, and I’m presumably more tech savvy than average.
Nintendo, Microsoft, Xbox, ea accounts, none of which I use as an adult. It’s a mess, no wonder many parents just don’t bother.
This position fails when these mistakes, in this case social media, purposefully and knowingly override our monkey brains and when widespread adoption of these mistakes allow severe negative outcomes to emerge.
Lastly, it is extremely hard for most people to escape the pull of (ostensibly) social networks and doing so anyway comes with social cost.
The more I think about it the less and less difference I see between social media and porn.
I agree. I’d much rather if we simply banned personalised algorithmic feeds, for everyone. They’re the new smoking. They’re toxic to mental health and to society more broadly. They’re no good for adults or children - so no need for age checks for any of it.
YouTube and Facebook could still work. Just show the channels I’m subscribed to instead of whatever an AI thinks will drive me toward addiction. Even YouTube’s recommended “watch next” could survive. They’d just have to base the recommendations on what the viewer population as a whole enjoy instead of putting me personally in a bubble.
This isn't a technological problem but a human one. The fundamental problem is that we haven't developed generalisable, scalable and profitable business models on the internet that aren't toxic.
The personalised algorithmic junk came later. It was never required for the websites to be wildly popular.
You would go on Facebook for 5 minutes and catch up with your friends. Great.
That’s not much time to shovel adverts. Better to get you engaged with ragebait or cute kittens or whatever keeps you on the site for an hour or 5.
If we banned personalised algorithmic feeds, I'm sure some social media companies would go out of business. I'm still waiting to hear any downside.
Something like the original Facebook where it’s just posts from your direct friends and no public content would be sustainable. It just wouldn’t make a trillion dollar company.
This is just banning social media with one extra step, these apps are virtually useless without personalization and their economy relies on it. I'm all for banning these platforms, we're all hooked on them and we need a hard ban, I know it won't happen but it's the only way.
If I want to add personalization I could add a algorithm to do that, only so that it promotes my wellbeing.
It really shouldn't be this difficult.
Or something like that.
But then again, it’s kinda a free world. You can’t just ban everything. I think an age ban is a good middle road.
But banning meat? That is just completely ridiculous. I would 100% agree that factory farming has to stop, as it's damaging to our environment, our animal friends, and ourselves even. But the reality is that (nearly all) humans need meat to thrive. No need to eat it every single day, but definitely a good idea to eat tons of it in general (including fish). This can and should be done in a more sustainable way: regenerative farming.
And just to point it out: vegetable farming is not a holy grail that could even solve this problem. Many would become weak, ill and possibly unfertile.
Social media was popular before the algorithmically tuned endless scroll.
Social media should not show any posts from people you haven’t friended.
Since about 2012 or so I was dreaming of a simple law or something on the books that banned ads in algorithmic feeds. It would be a really easy way to stop us from getting where we are today. It certainly would have slowed down the walled gardens and shittification of the internet.
I deal with teenagers that are on this stuff now and it's a fight, constantly. They hate hearing me go on about it.
What do yall think of Snapchat b.c we just caved and let my daughter use it.
Younger folks find this horrifying, and no longer use Facebook.
But older folks have more money. It’s just that, traditionally, older folks have been harder to manipulate through advertising, so advertisers generally target younger folks, who are more receptive to the kind of emotional games played by advertisers.
Facebook, however, is a goldmine, because it can affect older folks, like advertisers can affect younger generations.
I feel that the younger generation is much more cynical, and less responsive to media manipulation, than people give them credit for.
As an older person, though, I see my peers being led around like a dog at Westminster. It’s kind of embarrassing, frankly.
It's an almost daily topic of conversation with my 13 yr old, who doesn't have social media (answering "but why, dad" for the 1000th time). Exhausting.
Freedom and all that.
I'd much rathar have social media and not be a slave to the state.
instead we should force these platforms to open source their algorithm and give users choice with a following only feed. or make bluesky/at protocol style federation mandatory to prevent vendor lock in. you decide.
But from first hand, I grew up on social media and I can’t say it was really positive for me or the people around me that also grew up on/with social media.
I’m wondering how this would change mental health in young people. Can anyone point me to specific studies on this?
Control of speech through think of the children rhetoric.
From a social perspective, it wasn’t really until Instagram blew up in popularity and we had to start learning not to take people’s feeds as representative of how great their lives were that this stuff started to creep up. IMO Facebook was a little more text driven and myspace was mostly just middle school drama that would’ve taken place IRL anyway.
With my comment I was looking more into the direction of "the social media", where everything seems fake. I luckily grew up, when everything was still based on an actual timeline and not a deeply optimized algorithm.
"A recent study claimed to show that social media use was hurting kids' cognitive development.
But I had access to their data, so I was able to show that they were completely wrong."
Although I am a firm believer of the above, I do not believe that Governments are doing it because they do care about our health. Quite the opposite. I believe they want to manipulate us as much as they can so they can keep in power.
Although they want that, they have seen that social media has the power on gathering people and creating protests, so I believe they want to cut it off on younger people that usually have way more anger and got much less to lose (nowadays that the light at the end of the tunnel is fading) than a middle-aged man being mind-controlled his whole life being a good abiding citizen.
Its a power tool, they are just swinging it where they want. Soonish in EU we'll have the same ban, but it won't be because EU politicians cares about children, it is so they can keep their power and not have a generation that has access to other sources than traditional media and structured schools grooming them on just obeing their masters.
And when you speak of governments doing this to stay in power: which governments? All political parties in general? Just typical old-school politicians? Because there's a fairly atypical leader in the US, and there's an atypical rising force in Australia, and so on, and I think their popularity is stronger in older age brackets than aforementioned 15 year old.
And the social media companies don't want to manipulate you for power and profit?
The conspiratorial angles to these bans sounds an awful lot like the disinformation you see on social media about subjects like vaccines.
Governments produced far more disinformation about vaccines than social media, like claiming the covid vaccines reduced transmission when the studies behind them never claimed that and the actual data showed that clearly wasn't the case.
This is separate from mandating age verification onto everyone.
Personally I don't really care as to whether social media is banned or not, though I also don't think state actors should even be able to restrict us. However had, when it comes to age sniffing, I fail to see why I should yield my personal data, in order to access information on the www. This kind of defeats the purpose of www if a state can restrict us here (any state - not surprising in a dictatorship, but odd in a democracy).
I will absolutely be barring my children from social media. I fully expect them to use it or similar sorts of stuff behind my back, but that's okay. It will then be hidden and scarce, which limits the overall negative consequences it can have. Being in a country where this is enforced at a national level is extremely appealing to me.
Social media provides decentralized information transmission, so people (kids are people) are able to obtain information without it first being filtered through a small cabal of self-interested media corporations and governments. If there was no social media, the Iran war would probably have overwhelming popular support like the Iraq one and there'd already be US boots on the ground.
No media organisation is perfect but your description of social media as some nirvana of decentralised truth is very questionable.
And yes "decentralised" meaning we have personal echo-chambers or a swarm of Elon sycophant accounts with inflated number of views and bots mass liking each extremist post. LLMs are going to put astroturfing campaigns on steroids.
If these laws were about integrity in social media, there would be disclosure laws for paid time or content creation, disclosure of who pays for ads or time of creators. This would equally protect adults and kids instead of dubious age laws
Beyond this, advocating for privacy is not some prime directive that overrides everything else. The more fundamental issue is that social media is a complete cancer on society. Of course so are alcohol, tobacco, gambling, and many other vices, but the difference between social media and those other vices are that the others are age constrained. Age constraining is not only a completely reasonable standard, but exactly how we treat near to everything else of a similar, or arguably even lesser damaging, profile as social media.
None of this is being proposed in concert with the age laws for social media. The age limits are the least effective part of the control of adult alcohol and cigarette consumption.
Age limits are not the end, but the beginning, of regulation of a vice. In reality I don't expect social media will pass the test of time. It's just such a horrible industry. Australia's age restrictions have barely come online and people are already reporting major positive improvements with 43% already observing more in-person socialization, 38% reporting better parent-child relations, and more. [1] And again that's all within the ~6 months since the ban went live!
The Flynn Effect ('raw' IQ increasing over time) actually reversed in most of the Western world sometime in the 90s. In other words people today have a lower raw IQ than those of previous generations, and that's after controlling for immigration and other obvious factors. Australia's measured decline began in 2003, the same year MySpace was launched. I'd hypothesize that within a decade we'll see, if not an increase or stabilization, then at least a sharp reduction in decline rates. I suspect the oft said comment that social media makes people stupid isn't figurative or hyperbolic, but in fact quite literal!
[1] - https://yougov.com/articles/54334-new-yougov-research-shows-...
"Algorithms that track user engagement to prioritize what is shown tend to favor content that spurs negative emotions like anger and outrage. Overall, most online misinformation originates from a small minority of “superspreaders,” but social media amplifies their reach and influence."
https://www.apa.org/topics/journalism-facts/how-why-misinfor...
If you make a simple substitution, it becomes clear that "limits the overall negative consequences it can have" in no way logically follows from "behind my back" and "it will then be hidden". Draconian bans are, simply put, extremely lazy parenting, and not only lazy, but ineffectual. All the more so when it's something as relatively innocuous as social media, where your children will be actively shunned by their peers and come to resent you while still finding ways to use it. If you want good outcomes for your children, play an active role in their life and guide them positively instead of thinking you can just say "don't do X" and that will magically be the end of all problems.
And no the effects are not "relatively innocuous." It's having a catastrophically negative effect on children, especially girls. Rather than cherry picking one of the zillion studies to support this I'll just link to a search [1], because the evidence is not ambiguous.
[1] - https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=effects+of+social+media...
Psychology, incidentally, is a completely bunk field of fake science, with somewhere between 2/3rds and 3/4ths of papers being unreplicable. I am highly amenable to applying research and statistics to inform decision-making, but it does you no good if you're using faulty research and statistics. Using the 'authority' of a bad field as a bludgeon to avoid actually making your argument is not compelling. I suggest articulating a case yourself rather than reaching for an article dump as though it proves you objectively correct, unless your goal is simply to reinforce your own biases and assure yourself of the correctness of your decisions, their actual correctness be damned.
Also, I'd note there's kind of two different points of discussion here. One is "banning it for my child even though it's legal" and one is a "national ban". Even if you support the latter and believe it would have a positive outcome, that does not mean it will necessarily have a positive outcome to still ban your children when all of their peers are definitely using it. As far as I see it, a national ban is a complete non-starter for positive outcomes because, regardless of whether it has or doesn't have a positive outcome on a child's social environment, for it to be enforceable requires acceding to a surveillance state in which internet usage is directly tied to your government ID, at which point the negative outcomes for society outweigh any possible positive outcome for children by 100 to 1. You do not want to give government complete and total control of the means of communication, I promise you. Even if you trust your current government to not abuse it, once they have that control it's never becoming undone, so you must also trust that every future government in your and your children's lifetimes will also not abuse the uncontrolled power they've been given -- and if you have that level of unconditional trust in any society, I have a mighty fine bridge to sell you, a real beauty it is.
And as an aside, the whole point of me linking to a search of all studies that the results are not only replicable, but universal. Social media is just horrible for society, especially children, everywhere.
[1] - https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/php/data-statistics/youth-data-t...
My personal opinion is supported by life experiences and rational thinking. If all you can do is outsource your thoughts to other people with a 75% miss rate, of which 25% of studies came to the opposite effect when attempted to be replicated, you are simply a tool to be used by propagandists. Let's not forget that psychology is a field that is as likely to find a consistent effect for psychic powers - literal psychic powers - as it is anything else[1]. Those studies are not 'evidence' of anything. The bar is on the floor when it comes to the level of scientific rigor exhibited in the field.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-o...
Actually, the more emotionally invested you are in it, the less likely it is for you to question the motives behind it.
[1] - https://yougov.com/en-gb/daily-results/20251202-12c49-2
I think we lost this fight about 2-3 decades ago, when we sacrificed privacy for free stuff, mainly because the environment wasn’t this hostile yet. However, these additional steps in the wrong direction doesn’t help at all, but I also think that nobody will get any new information with these nowadays.
But I think the conversation people aren't having is the reverse of this: when is it time to ban people over, say, 65 from social media? They're often victims of scams and propaganda bot farms.
What do we do about adult radicalization on the Internet?
This is why they have lobbied many states in America for age verification laws, and are the alleged main funding source for the campaigns trying to make this about child safety when it’s about their profits. And the governments support it because it means they can identify people online and suppress speech. It’s literally the fascist notion of merging corporate power and authoritarian government power.
Like banning the sale of nicotine products to under-16s, it won't be a perfect solution as a few will continue to work around the restriction, but it's a huge step in the right direction.
I'm generally supportive of bans like this, but I don't want it to come at the expense of the privacy of adult users. I fear this is the way we're going in the west.
0: https://soyacincau.com/2025/12/15/mcmc-social-media-instant-...
It's quite a nice, flattering term for these companies. They get to advertise their platforms as being 'social' (bringing people closer together, having firneds), and 'media' (wow look at all these fun, cool pics and videos!), when in reality, it's kinda the opposite.
I think we need to start naming things based on who actually owns these companies, the essence of their operations, and where they generate the most of their revenues from. Ad Platforms? Surveillance Boards?
If they can't demonstrate positive value, then countries are absolutely right to cut out a cancer.
I'm hugely in favour of more regulation with more revenue/users. If my income tax scales, so should the penalties associated their wealth extraction models. Ideally these big tech firms should be eliminating all the negative externalities associated with their use, either through funding systems, or a direct tax on revenue.
The privacy side is worrying, but does Meta, Google, etc products are the antithesis of privacy anyway. Anything which burns their model and ideologies to the ground is a welcome change. As long as these draconian regulations only impact the hugest companies who don't demonstrate positive value, I think it's ok. If they start coming for smaller sites, message boards, etc, then it's a problem.
That still exists. I know people who mostly use just that part and don't like to doomscroll. I also personally connected to new people through socials and these friendships are pretty strong.
Keeping children off the internet requires everyone - including adults - be verified and identified online. This is a bad solution to mental health problems. Parents need to control and care for their kids, not take away everyone’s rights because they’re bad parents.
Malaysia is a secular country with secular laws. Islam is its official religion, and has a Syariah court that only applies to Muslim with limited jurisdiction.
Big difference than what you are trying to paint. As they cannot "suppress speech and civil liberties" if the law reach is limited.
If we're going toward this highly curated model, which I'm not against, I'm wondering if this would be a reasonable solution to preventing the exploitation of minors on the internet.
I would never let my kids access YouTube Kids, and I probably also wouldn't let them loose unsupervised on a kids-only internet either, but I would much prefer it to the alternative whack-a-mole approach of trying to make the actual internet a kids friendly place, which will eventually destroy online anonymity and turn a few of the biggest tech companies into de facto gatekeepers for everyone and handing them a regulatory moat the size of the Atlantic.
I think it's a fools errand to try to keep building walled gardens and hoping to keep the vermin out. What I'm proposing is a literal second internet. No ads, no adult content, no third party tracking, and with training wheels.
We need children to understand what internet scams are, we need them to understand how to use a search engine, and we need them to develop behavioral norms with respect to social media.. we can't do that by just yelling at them to go outside.
So I earnestly want to know how much this would cost.
The bulk of exploitation comes from
1. Big tech. I imagine that 90% of "internet for kids" would be Cocomelon AI-generated slop
2. Other kids bullying each other
Not to mention the simple fact that if you shelter kids from any adult content then they'll turn 18 while still having child-like mindset, which means that "exploitation of kids" will turn into "explanation of young adults".
Easier but still hard would be e.g. a child-mode[0] for consumer[1] operating systems that can only connect to a DNS resolver which itself only resolves certified-by-age-rating content. This would "only" be "extremely expensive": people complain about the cost of getting a film an age rating, and they're only 1-3 hours long and don't get near-continuous updates.
My guess, and it is a guess, is that content for children shouldn't be "the internet", but a small and specifically curated collection for each age range[2], essentially the back catalogue of all the things we've already made for kids, from Saturday morning cartoons to Scholastic books. Of course, this is still flawed, hence my parents' generation fretting over D&D, Harry Potter, and anything about sex education (and twice over if it was gay).
[0] or a multitude, corresponding to film content rating systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_picture_content_rating_...
[1] Despite having learned to read with the Commodore 64 user manual, I'd say that if you can get into a command-line OS today with all our easier distractions, then you shouldn't even get asked how old you are.
[2] Even single shows split content in this way, e.g. Sesame Street has different muppets be representative of different developmental stages of kids.
I will do everything in my power to keep my youngest connected to all the social networks he wants and I will not take those legal requirements into consideration.
People should be able to create an account at birth. Then when they grow up, they are ready to use the account. This way proves that the account owner is at least as old as the account.
The to me interesting part is how these all allege to restrict under-age people, but EVERYONE will be forced to give out their year. Aka the world wide web is turned into a giant age-sniffing network. I don't buy for a second that this is due to the alleged "we must protect children". What is also weird is ... if you are 15 years old, you get restricted here; at age 16, you don't, and at age 18 you are often taken from mandatory draft (in some countries) to be used for training in the military. In modern warfare with drones, this means cannon fodder, while the superrich are exempt from everything (look at the orange man and ask him when he served). Something is fundamentally broken here.
This is because in Malaysia we already have seen enough examples of bad, vague laws have been used to shut up/down the ethnic minorities and dissenters, adding this ban will not change too much of the landscape.
Banning younger children to have a social media account is good. If we can ban kids from driving because their brains aren't fully developed yet, why not just ban social media account for the same reason?
It's actually sickening to see that everyone-- especially children-- glues to phone in public space: playground, restaurants and whatnot. Of course you can say that adults should follow the same ban but adults are more resistant to the opium of social media ( refer to the driving car example above). So I think the double standard is excusable.
The detriment effects of social media towards the young, girls especially, are well documented ( see the Jonathan Hahdt book "the anxious generation"). So I think the ban is valid.
Social media is more harmful than alcohol, and it could solicit so much negative reactions at formation age. This needs to be global.