Singapore Needs Child-Safe Social Media, Not a Blanket Ban

Australia offers a warning—and a useful comparison

Australia’s Social Media Minimum Age Act creates an obligation for age-restricted platforms to take reasonable steps to prevent children under 16 from holding accounts. The obligation took effect on 10 December 2025.

Singapore should study that model closely, but not copy it automatically. A minimum-age rule may reduce exposure to certain harms, yet it can also create incentives to evade checks, move to less regulated services or use an adult’s account. Singapore’s Ministry of Digital Development and Information has acknowledged that available age-assurance methods are not foolproof and can be circumvented in this way.

The practical lesson is that an age limit should be a backstop—not the entire safety system. It should sit alongside platform accountability, app-store controls, safer defaults and education.

Regulate the design features that shape behaviour

Child safety is not only about illegal or obviously harmful content. It is also about how products influence attention, contact and discovery. Singapore’s proposed safeguards should require platforms to assess and reduce risks created by features such as:

• autoplay and infinite scrolling;
• highly persuasive recommendation systems;
• streaks, engagement rewards and late-night prompts;
• public discoverability and unsolicited direct messages;
• frictionless sharing and location exposure; and
• design choices that make reporting, blocking or leaving difficult.

Singapore’s online-safety framework already focuses designated services on user safety, including child safety and harmful-content risks. The next step should be to make design duties specific, auditable and tied to the experience that minors actually receive.

Make child-safe defaults mandatory

Platforms serving minors should be expected to provide protective settings from the moment an account is created, rather than requiring children or parents to find and activate them. A baseline could include:

• private profiles and limited search visibility;
• restrictions on adult-to-child contact, tagging and group invitations;
• tighter controls on direct messages, livestreaming and location sharing;
• reduced collection and use of children’s data;
• age-appropriate recommendation and content systems;
• prominent reporting, blocking and help-seeking tools; and
• rapid escalation for grooming, sexual exploitation, self-harm and other serious risks.

These measures should be accompanied by effective appeals. A system that protects children but provides no meaningful way to correct mistaken removals or account restrictions will be difficult to trust and improve.

Give blocking powers a clear role

Blocking should be a proportionate enforcement tool for platforms that refuse to meet safety duties or repeatedly fail after being given a reasonable opportunity to improve. It should not be the automatic response to every failure.

To make that distinction credible, Singapore should require measurable compliance, including:

1. independent child-safety risk assessments;
2. evidence about recommendation, contact and moderation systems;
3. regulator access to relevant records and testing;
4. regular audits and public transparency reporting; and
5. meaningful penalties before, or alongside, restrictions on access.

This would create a clear bargain: platforms can reach young users if they demonstrate that their products are safe enough for them.

Use age assurance carefully and protect privacy

Singapore has already imposed age-assurance requirements on designated app stores to reduce the likelihood that under-18 users download age-inappropriate apps. It also plans to extend age-assurance requirements to designated social-media services.

Those checks should be designed around data minimisation and independent privacy oversight. No single method—age verification, estimation or inference—can reliably solve the problem on its own. Age assurance should therefore be combined with app-store controls, platform responsibility and safety-by-design, rather than treated as proof that a child is safe online.

Build capability alongside regulation

Rules cannot replace digital literacy. Schools, families and youth organisations should help children understand consent, boundaries, scams, manipulation, reporting and healthy use. Parents need controls and safety guidance that are prominent, simple and available in the languages families use—not buried several layers deep in settings menus.

Young people should also be involved in testing the system. Youth panels, including participants from vulnerable groups, could assess whether privacy defaults, reporting tools and age-based restrictions work in practice. That feedback matters because a safeguard that looks strong on paper may be ignored, misunderstood or easily bypassed.

A workable principle for Singapore

Singapore should make access conditional on responsible product design:

Platforms earn access to young users by making their services safe by design; children gain greater freedom as their age, capability and safeguards increase.

A tiered framework would preserve access to useful online communities while reducing exposure to harmful content, unwanted contact and engagement-driven design. Australia’s under-16 rule shows that a hard minimum age is possible, but Singapore can aim for a more graduated model—one that combines age assurance with enforceable platform duties, privacy protection and the skills children need for life online.