Harris Zainul was quoted by The Edge Malaysia Weekly on May 11, 2026 – May 17, 2026
by Ravinyaa Ravimalar / The Edge Malaysia
When news broke of a proposed social media ban for those under 16, Seah Lu Sean, mother of two children aged 14 and 11, says parents in her community were torn between welcoming the move and feeling anxiety over how it would be implemented and its impact on families.
This comes as Malaysia is strengthening its regulatory framework on online safety. The Online Safety Act 2025 (ONSA), in force since January, introduced obligations for service providers to curb harmful online content and enhance user protection.
Alongside this, the government is preparing to enforce a minimum age requirement of 16 for social media use, expected to take effect in the second quarter of the year.
The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) is studying various age-verification mechanisms, including through a regulatory sandbox involving major platforms such as Meta, Google and TikTok.
Social media and messaging services with at least eight million users in Malaysia already fall under the country’s licensing framework and are automatically deemed licensees under the Communications and Multimedia Act. Meta platforms’ Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, ByteDance’s TikTok, YouTube and Telegram meet the criteria.
“The foundation of it all is to ensure the online space is safer and that children don’t fall victim … whether to cyberbullying, paedophiles and so on. And at this time, the discussion process between MCMC and all social media platforms is underway,” Minister of Communications Datuk Fahmi Fadzil confirmed to media during the Google 2026 APAC Online Safety Dialogue Malaysia, held in Kuala Lumpur on April 28.
Fahmi said a pilot programme would be rolled out shortly, with age verification expected on platforms by mid-year.
“On one hand, we welcome the government taking online safety seriously. With cyberbullying, inappropriate content and excessive screen time being major concerns, those with younger children are relieved. They can simply say, ‘it’s the law’,” says Seah, who is also the chief operating officer at MakChic, a Malaysian-based parenting platform.
At the same time, she is uncertain over how the restriction can be enforced once it is rolled out, pointing out that social media is deeply embedded in children’s daily lives, particularly in education and communication.
“My son says he’s missing out because he cannot communicate with his classmates, especially when they have to do project work,” she adds.
In response, Seah allows her son limited access to certain platforms, with parental controls in place.
Despite these controls, Seah, like many parents of young children, is cognisant that such mitigation measures are not sufficient to fully address the risks.
Moreover, as social media use grows, so too have concerns about their impact on children, which range from excessive screen time and mental health challenges to increased exposure to scams, fraud and online grooming.
The parental-control features, often referred to as family pairing or supervised accounts, allow parents to monitor and manage their children’s online activity, including by setting screen time limits, restricting content and controlling interactions.
For instance, TikTok has a family pairing feature that allows parents, guardians and teens to customise their safety settings based on individual needs. Parents can review and adjust the settings for their children as needed. Teenagers can increase their own restrictions, but cannot reduce those set by the parents.
Parents can link their TikTok account to their teen’s account and configure controls, including for daily screen time, interactions, direct messages, comments, topics and keywords.
Balancing child safety and access
However, industry players caution against overly rigid restrictions.
Meta’s director of public policy for Central Southeast Asia and Asean, Clara Koh, believes that policymakers should adopt a more nuanced approach to crafting regulations involving youth and children, drawing lessons from other countries.
“What we’ve seen in countries that imposed a ban is that it hasn’t really been effective. A lot of young people banned from social media end up going to platforms that are unregulated and less safe. And this obviously is going against the whole idea of why bans were put in in the first place,” she said during Meta’s Media Briefing on Instagram Teen Account Updates Rolling Out in Malaysia on April 15.
Citing the experience in Australia, where various targeted restrictions have been introduced, Koh says the results have often been fragmented enforcement and uneven safety protections, with some platforms falling entirely outside the scope of regulation.
However, imperfect regulation is still better than inaction, asserts Harris Zainul, director of research at the Institute of Strategic & International Studies (ISIS) Malaysia.
“We should not make perfect the enemy of the good,” he says, citing the aphorism often attributed to French philosopher Voltaire.
“As a society, we are comfortable banning the sale of certain dangerous items to children, even if enforcement is not watertight. So why hold social media regulation to a different standard? If even a segment of children benefits, that is already a net positive.”
ONSA marks a significant shift from reactive enforcement where action is only taken after harmful content surfaces, to a more proactive approach, says Harris.
“ONSA changes things by creating a set of duties and responsibilities for platforms to proactively reduce harms, including by conducting risk assessments.”
In the past, the emphasis was on downstream intervention, or acting as an afterthought, such as requesting platforms to remove harmful content, prosecution of creators of harmful content and fact-checking, adds Harris.
The new regulations are expected to impose stricter guard rails upstream.
“The main opportunity with ONSA to meaningfully move the needle in protecting users online is through the proactive duties and responsibilities. This upstream intervention, if implemented genuinely and meaningfully by the platforms, can result in a social media environment that is safer and optimised for public rather than private interest,” Harris stresses.
Under ONSA, two key codes have been introduced: the Risk Mitigation Code, which relates to the duty to implement measures to reduce exposure to harmful content under Section 13, and the Child Protection Code (CPC), which outlines the duty to safeguard child users under Section 18.
Still, regulating the digital space remains complex.
Industry players remain instinctively averse to regulatory limitations such as age verification and wary of content moderation, which can prove difficult to enforce and is fraught with reputational risk.
The stakeholders have flagged similar concerns in consultations with MCMC, particularly around identity verification, data protection and operational feasibility.
“There needs to be clarity and transparency on how these mechanisms will work in practice,” says an industry source.
MCMC conducted a public consultation exercise from Feb 12 to March 13, which was subsequently extended to March 31. According to its website, the exercise gathered feedback from service providers, participants, civil societies and other related parties.
An MCMC source confirmed that feedback from these consultations is being reviewed and will inform a forthcoming report, alongside the proposed age-verification framework.
Google Malaysia’s country managing director Ben King says society now lives in an increasingly digital world and the priority should be to protect children within that digital environment rather than shielding them from it entirely.
“We have been working on this [online safety] for some time. We want to make sure that the children and teens have age-appropriate experiences that are right for them, whether across [Google] search, Gemini or YouTube. We have a range of different parental controls as well, like Family Link, which helps parents really stay in control of what their children are browsing. We have been doing a bunch of stuff for a long time,” he says.
“The government’s looking at this very closely and we will continue to stay in conversation with the government. It’s a very much evolving conversation at the moment. But as I said, we very strongly believe that we do not want to protect kids from the digital world; we want to protect them in the digital world.”
Is age verification the way to go?
Proposals to raise the minimum age and introduce age-verification methods — such as electronic know your customer (e-KYC), which would require users to submit identity documents such as their MyKad, passport or MyDigital ID — could introduce significant privacy and security risks such as surveillance and exclusion.
Experts stress that any age-assurance measures must be proportionate, preserve privacy and be evidence based, rather than relying on broad, intrusive systems.
National identity systems such as MyDigital ID are an important development, but digital identity verification cannot rely on a single national framework, particularly in a cross-border digital economy, says Oon Ee Khoon, senior vice-president and managing director for Asia-Pacific at Jumio.
“A more viable model is one that supports verification through a range of trusted, official identity documents such as passports and national identity cards, enabling organisations to verify users consistently across jurisdictions,” says Oon.
This is especially important for platforms that operate globally, whose user bases span multiple countries and regulatory regimes. A single-ID system creates immediate gaps in coverage, particularly for foreign nationals or users residing outside of their country of origin, she says.
US-headquartered Jumio is an identity verification platform that helps businesses confirm that their users are who they claim to be online. It is widely used for e-KYC, anti-money laundering and age-verification compliance.
“I have concerns on the privacy issues. We should not be sharing any personal data online, especially if it involves putting minors’, children’s personal data. Who is going to be keeping this data? Who is going to have access to it? It’s got serious privacy and data security concerns,” Seah points out.
A group of civil society organisations (CSOs) and individuals raised similar concerns in a memorandum to the Prime Minister in April, warning that expanded data collection could enable surveillance and expose users to misuse by both state and private actors.
“It does not address the systemic and structural drivers of harm in digital spaces and may ultimately prove ineffective. Far from solving the problem, it threatens to entrench it. It is critical that we adopt evidence-based, rights-respecting regulations [that are] grounded in nuance, rather than a total prohibition on children under 16 from participating in the digital world. Children do not need to be excluded from digital spaces; instead, they need protection within them, along with the skills and safeguards to participate safely and meaningfully,” read a statement.
It was endorsed by 57 local CSOs, including ARTICLE 19, All Women’s Action Society and Yayasan Chow Kit, as well as 26 international organisations and three individual members.
Additionally, the CSOs stressed that linking age verification to government-issued documents and overly broad identity-verification systems is likely to lead to exclusion, discrimination or reinforce existing barriers to access, particularly for individuals and at-risk communities without recognised identity documents and who are already facing structural discrimination.
“It is likely to be exploited by government, private corporations and malicious actors alike. Such measures risk normalising mass data collection, privacy invasions and eroding anonymity online,” stated the CSOs.
Furthermore, the proposal to introduce a social media ban for users under 16 through the CPC under ONSA does not have a legal basis, they added. The Act, the CSOs argue, does not provide for a blanket ban and instead presumes children’s access, focusing on safer digital environments.
Imposing a ban through subsidiary legislation that appears to contradict the Parent Act raises serious concerns of executive overreach and represents a setback in the protection of children’s rights as enshrined under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, they said.
ISIS’ Harris, however, suggests that age verification need not come at the expense of privacy. He notes that there are emerging solutions that allow users to prove their age without disclosing their identity.
“In this case, a person would need to prove their age to a service provider who will then issue them with a digital token that only contains one piece of information: whether the user is above or below the age of 16. This token can then be used to verify the user’s age as they access the social media service,” he explains.
“It is clear that this is the preferred option as it meets the government’s goal of delaying children’s access to highly addictive and mentally damaging social media platforms until they turn the age of 16 while being privacy preserving.”
Other than technical concerns, the CSOs say that a blanket ban may not address the root of the problem.
They have called on the government to reconsider the proposal, stressing that children should not be excluded from the digital world but enabled to navigate it safely.
“It is the platforms and their business models that exploit children, and these are what should be regulated.”
Mediha Mahmood, CEO of Content Forum, says the objective of stronger protection for children online is sound, but the emphasis must be on whether the approach is workable, proportionate and capable of reducing harm in practice.
“[However] our focus is less on the label attached to the policy and more on whether the overall system actually makes children safer, without creating new blind spots or placing the burden too heavily on families alone,” she says,
An age threshold may send a clear policy signal, but it is not a complete solution. Meaningful safety gains depend on a combination of platform safeguards, effective parental tools and age-appropriate digital literacy.
“A more nuanced model is therefore likely to be more durable, particularly where supervised or parent-managed use is part of the framework now being considered in Malaysia,” says Mediha.
Unicef’s Malaysia representative Robert Gass concurs, adding that while age-based restrictions may be part of the solution, they are unlikely to be sufficient on their own and may introduce new risks.
“If restrictions simply exclude children from mainstream platforms, there is a strong likelihood they will move to less regulated or harder-to-monitor spaces. This reduces visibility, weakens protections and makes it more difficult to intervene when harm occurs,” he says.
Instead, regulation should prioritise making digital environments safer by design, through age-appropriate services, stronger safety features and systems that identify and close loopholes.
“Children also need to build digital skills progressively. Policies should support this by combining protection with education and empowerment, rather than relying solely on exclusion-based approaches that may not reflect how children actually engage online,” adds Gass.
This article first appeared in Digital Edge, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on May 11, 2026 – May 17, 2026
