Social media bans for preteens and children are a craze sweeping the world. Indonesia is the latest to join the wave, as it has begun enforcing a sweeping ban on social media use for children under 16, instantly turning the world’s most digitally connected countries into a testbed for how far governments are willing to go to regulate how online a child can be.
The policy includes platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter/X. Even Roblox, a video game that has built an audience of millions of children worldwide, has been banned. Many of these services are more than just apps for these kids. They are default social environments, 21st-century playgrounds where kids hang out.
The goal is to limit exposure to pornography, cyberbullying, scams, and the algorithmically driven addiction that turns modern screens into tools of dependency.
Indonesia Just Banned Social Media for Kids and Teens.
While several nations have instituted similar bans, like Australia, what makes Indonesians ban different is its scale. Indonesia’s population hovers around 280 million, with roughly 70 million children affected. That is a systemic, mass reset of access to online environments that very quickly became interwoven within children’s lives and have now been excised entirely.
Australia’s social media ban only impacts a fraction of that number. Indonesia is essentially stress-testing whether a modern society heavily reliant on its Internet-connectedness can pry itself from the chokehold Big Tech has on global society, without breaking daily life in the process.
Implementation will be the true test. The Indonesian government is going to roll out the policy gradually, giving platforms time to comply and to report underage accounts. Enforcement will be difficult, as aforementioned nations like Australia have found, because kids are clever and have a lot of free time on their hands.
They will spend that time trying to find ways around those security measures.
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