Social Media Use
Should the Philippines Ban Social Media for Minors?
2026 has become a turning point in how governments worldwide treat young people's access to social media. Australia entered the year with its under-16 restrictions already in force—the world’s first nationwide ban of its kind. Indonesia followed with restrictions on under-16 access to so-called “high-risk” digital platforms, becoming the first Southeast Asian nation to do so, while the United Kingdom announced an Australian-style under-16 ban expected to take effect in 2027.
The Philippines, too, has entered the same debate with growing intensity. Lawmakers in both chambers have filed proposals modeled partly on developments abroad. These measures echo concerns over cyberbullying, sexual exploitation, scams, harmful or extremist content, and associations between certain patterns of social-media use and poorer adolescent mental health. Social-media algorithms that run amok can amplify sensational or divisive material, while platforms collect enormous amounts of behavioral data that allow companies to predict and shape user behavior.
A recent string of school shootings has hardened regulators' resolve. In August, a junior high school student opened fire at a school in Zamboanga City, followed a month later by a similar attack at a school in South Cotabato. Subsequent investigations fueled concern over violent online subcultures, but they have not established that social media, much less a particular platform, caused either attack.
Manila is taking notes from its neighbors, and looks eager to join the bandwagon—but some of its recent interventions raise fundamental questions about freedom, effectiveness and privacy. Just a few days ago, its Cybercrime Investigation and Coordinating Center (CICC) banned all Filipino users from Reddit and Discord after the platforms failed to set up “a physical presence” within a day.
The Philippine case is symptomatic of a habit that skeptics of concentrated power have been warning against for centuries. Give the government an inch, and it will take a mile. Governments can quickly turn a regulation into an arbitrary infringement on individual liberty. Obviously, children need protection and supervision. But why should the government make this decision for children in the first place? Why should we give the state the coercive power to restrict all uses—even responsible ones—of social media by children for communication, learning, association, and self-expression?
In essence, the social media ban for minors frames the problem binarily, in which either platforms police children’s behavior, or government does. But neither is the answer. A blanket ban effectively replaces the judgment of parents and guardians—the people best placed to judge a specific child’s maturity and vulnerabilities. That's especially true in a Philippine context, where extended, multigenerational households often share the work of raising a child and can catch warning signs a distant regulator never will. Hypothetically, if the government’s attempt to ban children from social media worked perfectly, it would still have sacrificed freedom at the altar of safetyism.
But will a blanket social-media ban work in the first place? So far, the evidence overseas is mixed. While Australia’s regulator reported that around 4.7 million accounts belonging to under-16s were restricted after the law took effect, the government later reported that most teenagers aged 10 to 15—around eight in ten—were still using social media three months into the ban. The system has to contend with workarounds by these “digital natives,” inaccurate age assessments, and appeals from users wrongly classified as minors.
Does banning a platform mean kids simply stop exercising their freedom to communicate? Australia’s case seems to suggest that the more you forbid something, the more you make it desirable. And even if a ban succeeds in shutting young users out of mainstream platforms, incentive theory predicts they will simply move to smaller, less visible corners of the internet, where the safeguards regulators sought to enforce may be weaker or nonexistent. Mainstream platforms at least have community guidelines and human moderators, however imperfect. With rogue platforms, we risk trading a monitored danger for an unmonitored one.
There's also the question of privacy. Enforcing an age restriction at scales requires some form of age assurance. Depending on the system, that could involve identity documents, facial age estimation, third-party verification, behavioral signals or combinations of these methods. Each creates trade-offs among accuracy, privacy and ease of circumvention.
That's a hard sell in a country with its own history of major data-security failures. The 2023 PhilHealth ransomware breach, for instance, exposed hundreds of gigabytes of files containing personal and sensitive personal information. Even the country's own ban on adult websites hasn't dented its ranking as one of the world's heaviest consumers of porn.
Anonymity also has real value in a country dealing with its share of violence, cultural conservatism, and state overreach. Reddit's pseudonymous format, for instance, has long let young people discuss sensitive topics without attaching them to their real names. A ban, therefore, strips a layer—and often, a final one—of protection from users.
And what of the school shootings? The same incidents revealed another detail that deserves attention, where in both cases, the firearms were accessed from fathers employed by government institutions.
Perhaps the government should regulate itself first.
Online radicalization communities deserve scrutiny, and rightly so. But illegal access to firearms is the clearer part of the causal chain that the government cannot ignore.
Thankfully, some lawmakers understood this and filed House Bill No. 11387, which would amend Republic Act No. 10591 by imposing stricter firearm-storage requirements, mandatory gun-safety training, tougher penalties for unauthorized access and a new offense covering criminally negligent firearm access.
None of this means the underlying worries on social media are imaginary. But a more durable answer is to equip children and parents to navigate a digital world that governments cannot wish away, rather than attempting to seal young people off from it altogether.
One alternative gaining attention among communication and media scholars is a “harm-minimisation approach”. In a 2025 paper, researchers affiliated with the University of Sydney explained that the approach “recognises that some underage engagement with social media is inevitable and seeks to reduce associated risks through education and skill-building.” They advocate equipping young people with digital literacy, resilience and help-seeking skills, while involving parents, schools and adolescents themselves in designing safer approaches to social-media use.
Adolescence, in this view, offers an opportunity to build those skills before young people gain unrestricted access, rather than assuming that prohibition itself will somehow teach them how to navigate online environments.
Such programs could be integrated into educational curricula. Children and parents could learn how recommendation algorithms shape what appears on their screens; how grooming, scams and social engineering work; how to distinguish credible information from disinformation and AI-generated material; how to use privacy and safety controls; and when an online encounter should be brought to a parent, teacher, platform or law-enforcement agency.
A Philippine digital-literacy effort must draw in schools, libraries, universities, civil-society groups, and families. Schools should teach digital resilience as a practical skill, while universities and civil-society groups could help develop and evaluate teaching materials, train educators and parents, and update programs as technologies and online threats evolve.
Children shielded from social media today will still meet algorithms, AI, and digital manipulation as adults. A ban merely delays the encounter and makes it more dangerous.
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Cesar Ilao III is Research Manager and Communications Specialist at the Foundation for Economic Freedom (FEF) in Quezon City. He is also a lecturer at the University of the Philippines Los Baños.