Time to follow suit
Ban teenagers and children from social media? Once upon a time, when the world was still enthralled by the possibilities offered by novel apps and platforms, a proposal to limit kids’ exposure to the new technology would have come off as premature, alarmist, unfounded.
But more than two decades later, the world seems to know better. Over 40 countries are now considering or debating laws that would impose curbs on how children are able to access and use social media. In December 2025, Australia became the first country to enact such a ban for kids under 16, the law applying to 10 major networks including Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, X, Reddit, and YouTube. Tech companies that fail or refuse to block underage users face massive fines of up to US$33 million.
Malaysia, Indonesia, the United Kingdom, and the United Arab Emirates have followed suit, enacting blanket bans on social media use by kids aged 15 or 16. The likes of Brazil, Portugal, and Italy are tying restrictions to parental consent by requiring teen users to link their accounts to a parent or guardian. Many other countries—France, Greece, Austria, Germany, Denmark, Spain, Norway, Canada, Turkey, Poland, Slovenia—are working on legislation that would impose similar restrictions on children’s ability to access online content.
Addictive features
The United States, the birthplace of the most popular and consequential social media apps from Facebook and Instagram to X and YouTube, has no government bans in place, but the backlash is coming from the courts. This year, New Mexico sued Meta, the company behind Facebook, on the charge that it allowed sexual predators on its platforms and misled the public about child safety. A jury concurred and ordered Meta to pay $375 million in damages. In California, a 20-year-old woman also accused Meta and YouTube of deliberately designing addictive features to hook young users. The jury sided with her and fined both companies $6 million in damages for negligence.
When some 40 countries—or over a fifth of the members of the United Nations—are already seeing the problem and taking action against it, it’s high time the Philippines did the same. The data on the harmful effects of unfettered screen time among children have accumulated over the years—the Australian government, for instance, said it moved based on research showing that seven out of 10 kids under 16 had been exposed to material promoting misogyny, violence, eating disorders, and suicide, and that over half of them had experienced cyberbullying.
Social media capital
But the Philippines is in an even more precarious position since the country remains the social media capital of the world, with Filipinos spending an average of nearly 34 hours per week online, well above global averages, and accessing about 8.4 different platforms every month. A 2025 Unicef survey had sobering findings: “Children and youth in the Philippines are regularly exposed to content or behavior online that makes them feel unsafe. In fact, 85.56 per cent of respondents reported encountering such issues [from inappropriate content to online abuse], with 57.26 per cent saying it happens multiple times.”
The horrific school shooting in Tacloban by two teens has intensified concerns about how unguided online gaming and content may be adversely affecting children’s cognitive and psychosocial development. The Philippine Pediatric Society (PPS), for one, said it does not recommend social media use among children 16 and below, a position supported by the Philippine Society for Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics (PSDBP). If kids are given access, “accounts should be comanaged by a parent or guardian, with active supervision, clear boundaries, and age-appropriate guidance, particularly for individuals with developmental and psychosocial vulnerabilities,” said the PPS.
Crying need
According to the group, because children and adolescents are in “sensitive and critical periods of neurodevelopment,” with their capacity for impulse control, emotional regulation, judgment, and social functioning “still maturing,” they are “more susceptible to highly stimulating, attention-capturing, and commercially driven digital environments.” In other words, the young are more prone to becoming addicted to algorithm-driven social media, triggered to spend long hours online where they are exposed to unsafe interactions and even exploitation.
The PSDBP warned that it has seen rising clinical cases of anxiety, emotional dysregulation, sleep disturbance, and worsening behavioral and developmental symptoms in young patients arising from unregulated social media use.
The research and policy work done by other countries should help the Philippines formulate its own urgent, particularized response to this problem. Whether through an outright ban, stringent age-verification requirements, or mandatory parental oversight, the crying need is for the country to do more to protect Filipino kids on the internet.
