Malaysia just took a bold step for its children. Now to do it well

 Since 1 June 2026, no Malaysian under 16 can open a social media account. The instinct is right and the evidence is on our side. The hard part, as Australia is already learning, is the enforcement.

Picture a 13-year-old in her bedroom at one in the morning, thumb flicking through an endless feed of strangers, each post quietly telling her she is not thin enough, not pretty enough, not enough.

She is no outlier. She is the median Malaysian teenager, and for fifteen years we let the feed raise her. On 1 June 2026, the state finally said no.

The measures fall under the Online Safety Act 2025 and its accompanying Child Protection Code. Any licensed platform carrying at least eight million Malaysian users – which captures Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube – must now verify age and block under-16s from signing up.

New users must prove their age using government records such as the MyKad, a passport or MyDigital ID, with checks for existing users rolling out over six months. Platforms that fail face penalties of up to RM10 million and, for repeat offenders, suspension.

Communications Minister Fahmi Fadzil has drawn a line between mere “assurance” and genuine “verification”. Parents, sensibly, will not be punished if a child slips through.

The cynics are already crying censorship, and that fear is worth taking seriously.

Done right, this is no infringement on civil liberties: no adult loses a feed and no content is banned. The state must verify one fact—a user’s age—and nothing more, never using the system to log what people read, watch or post.

On the core question of whether social media harms children, the research is no longer close.

In May 2023, then United States surgeon-general Vivek Murthy warned that adolescents who spend more than three hours a day on social media face double the risk of poor mental health outcomes, including symptoms of depression and anxiety.

The cruel detail is that the average teenager already spends about three and a half hours a day there.

The same advisory found that up to 95% of those aged 13 to 17 use a social media platform, and 46% said it made them feel worse about their bodies. This is no fringe activity harming a vulnerable few. A large minority of children are telling us, in their own words, that it hurts.

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, whose book The Anxious Generation has become the movement’s lodestar, argues that between 2010 and 2015 the social lives of a generation of teenagers migrated onto smartphones, calling this rewiring the single biggest cause of the mental health epidemic that began in the early 2010s.

His critics counter that correlation is not causation. That debate is real, but the precautionary logic is hard to dodge: we do not let children smoke while we wait for the final study to clear peer review.

For Malaysians the danger is not abstract. A Unicef study found that 91% of Malaysian children aged 13 to 17 use the internet daily, 70% have been exposed to disturbing content, and more than 40% would not seek help when something went wrong online. We rank among the worst in Asia for youth cyberbullying, with roughly three in ten young Malaysians reporting they have been targeted.

Then there is the figure that should end the argument. The Malaysian Mental Health Association has reported that at least 20% of youth suicides in recent years were connected to cyberbullying. When a fifth of the children we have lost were tormented through a screen, “let parents decide” stops sounding like freedom and starts sounding like abdication.

So, the instinct is right. But the execution is harder. Here Malaysia would be foolish not to study Australia, which switched on the world’s first national under-16 ban in December 2025. Within days, platforms removed access to 4.7 million under-16 accounts, proof the technology can move at scale when the law forces it to.

But Australia also exposed the cracks. Some children fooled facial age-estimation software by drawing on a beard, and advocates warned of sensitive identity data piling up on corporate servers.

Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant was withering about the platforms’ excuses, noting they “already had the technology and personal data” to enforce the rule.

Malaysia can do better than copy, and three fixes matter most.

First, the data. Verification should run through an independent, government-audited layer that confirms age and discloses nothing else, never handing MyKad or MyDigital ID details to foreign platforms, and never logging what users read, watch or post.

Deputy communications minister Teo Nie Ching’s promise that the process is “only limited to age verification” must be written into enforceable law, not left as a press line.

Second, the workaround. A ban any 12-year-old can defeat with a virtual private network is theatre, so the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission should publish hard compliance audits and treat circumvention rates, not sign-up screens, as the real measure of success.

Third, the vacuum. Banning a child from a feed without offering anything in its place is half a policy, so penalty money should fund digital literacy and the real-world spaces, sport, clubs and libraries that the feed has spent a decade replacing.

Malaysia has spent too long importing other countries’ mistakes along with their technology. This time though, on something that matters, it moved early and on the side of its children.

That alone deserves applause. Now comes the unglamorous part: the audits and the patient closing of loopholes.

Passing the law was the easy part. Whether it actually reaches the 13-year-old at one in the morning is the only test that counts. - FMT

The writer can be contacted at kathirgugan@protonmail.com.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.