The proposed Child Online Safety and Protection Act (Senate Bill No. 2424) recently sponsored by Senator Robinhood Padilla in the Senate deserves serious consideration because the issue is no longer whether children use social media, but whether society should allow children to enter platforms designed to capture and retain attention without adequate safeguards.
The bill proposes a minimum age of 16 for age-restricted social media, while allowing certified educational use and requiring platforms to implement age-assurance and child-safety measures.
The strongest argument for the measure is child protection against cyberbullying, online sexual exploitation, harmful content, addiction, sleep problems, and mental-health concerns. The proponents also recognize that parents cannot always compete with sophisticated algorithms designed to maximize engagement, thus, a uniform age threshold could give parents collective support rather than leaving each family to fight the problem alone.
There are, however, significant disadvantages. A ban can be circumvented, can isolate young people who depend on online communities, and may push them toward less regulated platforms. Australia provides an important warning. Its under-16 restrictions reduced account ownership from 52.4% to 42.1% within three months, but most children who previously had accounts were still able to retain or create accounts, largely because of weaknesses in age assurance. Australia has also encountered privacy concerns, because age assurance may involve facial, behavioral, device, and location signals.
Australia's experience therefore shows both the potential and limitations of prohibition. Indonesia has likewise introduced under-16 restrictions, while countries such as Brazil are pursuing parental-linking and age-assurance approaches rather than simply blocking young people from the digital world. The international trend suggests that regulation is preferable to an absolute internet ban.
In my view, the most amenable approach for the Philippines is neither unrestricted access nor an absolute social-media prohibition. The proposed 16-year threshold is defensible, but it should be accompanied by strong privacy protections, independent auditing of age-assurance systems, accessible appeals for wrongly restricted users, parental digital-literacy programs, and substantial penalties for platforms that deliberately circumvent the law. The government should also periodically review the policy based on evidence.
The objective should not be to keep Filipino children away from technology. It should be to ensure that technology serves children rather than children becoming products of technology.