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Ushar Daniele

Mohamad Syawal Samsuddin, a 37-year-old father of two young boys, said he supported Malaysia’s new under-16 social media ban because of concerns about harmful content and its effect on his children’s safety, mental health and privacy.
But he said the policy was not a substitute for parental supervision.
“The onus is on parents to monitor and observe their children’s behaviour online,” he said.
Cybersecurity and digital rights experts also question whether the ban can fully protect children, warning that its age-verification system could expose sensitive identity data while doing little to stop determined young users from finding workarounds.


The rules, which took effect on Monday, require social media platforms to verify users’ ages through government-issued identity documents or official digital identity systems, restrict under-16s from opening accounts and strengthen child-safety measures such as parental controls, privacy settings, content moderation and search or recommendation systems.
Taken together, those measures have left Malaysia’s policy facing two immediate tests: whether platforms can make age checks work in practice and whether they can do so without creating new vulnerabilities through data breaches, identity theft or weak oversight by third-party vendors.
The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) is implementing the regime through two frameworks: the Child Protection Code, which requires platforms to adopt a safety-by-design approach, and the Risk Mitigation Code, which mandates risk assessments, content governance and content labelling mechanisms.
Platforms that fail to comply with the Risk Mitigation Code face fines of up to US$2.5 million, though MCMC has said service providers would be given a grace period to meet the requirements.
The policy also puts pressure on platforms to make their services safer for children once users’ ages are known, including by limiting risky features and using algorithms to better rank, moderate and label content.
But Murugason R. Thangaratnam, a Malaysia-based cybersecurity practitioner, said even age-aware systems would struggle to judge what content was harmful, appropriate or legitimate for children.
“The idea of a completely ‘child-safe’ algorithm is appealing but largely unattainable,” Murugason said.
He said the line between harmful and legitimate expression was often contested, and attempts to eliminate all risks could result in excessive censorship and unintended restrictions of lawful speech.

“There is also the question of who defines ‘safe’ because cultural norms differ widely.”
He said while protecting children online was essential, large-scale identity verification introduces significant cybersecurity and privacy risks, especially in light of Malaysia’s history of major data breaches.
“Child safety must not come at the expense of privacy or increased identity theft risks.”
Siti Norliza Samsudin, a technologist at Malaysia-based civic tech initiative Sinar Project, said the system raised identity theft and privacy risks because users could not be certain that documents uploaded online would remain secure or be fully deleted.
She said privacy was a major concern because the behavioural and location data that social media platforms already accessed would now be expanded to include official identity documents, making online anonymity increasingly difficult.
“This is a risk to our freedom of expression online,” she said, adding the policy also failed to fully account for Malaysians who rely on social media for business.
She also warned the new verification requirement could lock some users out of social media, especially those who may struggle with digital systems or lack recognised documents, such as the elderly, tourists, refugees and asylum seekers.
“The current policy in place has been rushed, so these tests may not be conducted sufficiently to prevent these issues,” Siti said.
Other experts said MyDigital ID, Malaysia’s government-backed digital identity system, could serve as a safeguard, but only if platforms received a yes-or-no age confirmation rather than underlying details from MyKad, the country’s national identity card.
Mohamed Ridza Wahiddin, a cybersecurity expert with the International Islamic University Malaysia, said this would work only if the verification layer were centralised and secured, but such checks could still be bypassed using parents’ or siblings’ identification or a virtual private network – a secure encrypted tunnel between a device and the internet.
The larger risk, Ridza said, was that a policy designed to make mainstream platforms safer for children could end up pushing some young users into online spaces that are harder to police.
“These spaces are harder for authorities, parents and platform safety teams to monitor, potentially increasing exposure to harmful content, grooming and exploitation, ironically undermining the policy’s goal,” he said.
Malaysia’s decision to roll out the new regulations follows a series of violent incidents that have intensified official concern over children’s online activity, including the fatal stabbing of a girl by a 14-year-old boy in Bandar Utama last October and a Johor case in which police investigated whether a nine-year-old boy attacked his six-year-old brother after losing progress on the online gaming platform Roblox.

Malaysia’s approach follows a wider international push to restrict children’s access to social media, as governments test age limits, verification tools and platform duties to reduce minors’ exposure to harmful content.
Australia has gone furthest, requiring many platforms from December 10 last year to take reasonable steps to prevent children under 16 from holding accounts.
Australia’s eSafety Commissioner said platforms had restricted access to about 4.7 million accounts identified as belonging to under-16s by mid-December, though local media later reported continuing concerns over children bypassing age checks through misclassification, VPNs and other workarounds.
In Southeast Asia, Indonesia began gradually restricting under-16s in March from holding accounts on “high-risk” platforms including YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, Bigo Live and Roblox, making it the first country in the region to impose such curbs. Officials have also signalled plans to extend the restrictions to e-commerce platforms.


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Experts warn age checks could expose sensitive identity data while pushing determined minors towards harder-to-monitor spaces


Experts warn age checks could expose sensitive identity data while pushing determined minors towards harder-to-monitor spaces.


Could Malaysia’s under-16 social media ban expose children to new online risks?

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Experts warn age checks could expose sensitive identity data while pushing determined minors towards harder-to-monitor spaces

Experts warn age checks could expose sensitive identity data while pushing determined minors towards harder-to-monitor spaces