Social Media Bans: An Asian Perspective

Several Asian countries have been regulating children’s online activity for over a decade, and they have done so in ways that look fundamentally different from Australia’s blanket platform ban. China’s device-level “minor mode,” South Korea’s algorithmic regulation bills, Singapore’s app-store code, Taiwan’s parental-liability statute, and Japan’s voluntary municipal guidelines all target the same underlying concerns about youth wellbeing online. None of them ban social media outright. Australia is not, in any meaningful sense, the model these countries are following. And in some cases, the Australia model is precisely what they have learned to avoid.

The four jurisdictions that pioneered children’s online safety regulation in Asia – China, South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan – share something the Australia-following countries do not: they have all observed, over the better part of a decade, that blunt access restrictions tend to fail. Their current policy frameworks reflect this hard-won experience. Despite very different governance systems, they converge on a common insight: it is more effective to regulate the broader architecture of the digital environment (the device, the algorithm, the app store, the household) than to regulate the underage user account.

Across these four cases, the through-line is the same. None of these countries has banned youth from social media platforms. All have chosen – for their own reasons – to intervene in the digital environment surrounding children rather than to remove children from it.

The most effective policy mixes will combine binding platform obligations, design-level safety requirements, and meaningful family support. Ultimately, the goal is not to keep children off the internet, but to build a safer digital environment that does not exploit them when they are on it.