Age Verification Alone Cannot Protect Children in Digital Spaces

In early July 2026, Deputy Minister of Communication and Digital Affairs Nezar Patria revealed a finding that is hardly surprising to anyone closely observing children’s digital habits: three out of five children, or around 60 per cent, admit to falsifying their age to access social media. The finding emerged just as the government is accelerating the implementation of Government Regulation Number 17 of 2025 on Electronic System Governance for Child Protection, better known as PP TUNAS, a policy that positions Indonesia as the first country in Southeast Asia with such strict regulations for protecting children in the digital space. Behind this commendable regulatory achievement, however, lies a fundamental weakness in how we approach the problem that deserves clearer scrutiny.

The government, through the Deputy Minister’s official statement, places the responsibility for age verification almost entirely on the technology owned by each digital platform operator. Technically, this approach is understandable: platforms develop algorithms to recognise behavioural patterns of accounts suspected to belong to minors and then restrict their access. Yet herein lies the core problem. We are attempting to solve a human behavioural issue—the psychological drive of children to be socially accepted and not left behind by their peers—with a purely technical solution. This represents a common fallacy in public policy formulation: the belief that problems rooted in social behaviour can be resolved simply by improving systems, without addressing the underlying motivations. As long as there is a strong social incentive for children to access social media, no matter how sophisticated the age-detection algorithm is built, loopholes will always be sought and eventually found, whether by borrowing an adult’s identity, providing false information during account registration, or asking older relatives for help.

The 60 per cent figure is, in fact, compelling evidence that a platform-based verification approach alone has not been effective. Ironically, the response has largely been to demand that platforms further strengthen their age-identification technology, as if a solution that has already proven to have significant gaps merely needs reinforcing in the same form, rather than being re-evaluated in terms of its approach. Research in developmental psychology has long shown that children’s and adolescents’ behaviour in accessing digital spaces is heavily influenced by normative pressure from their peer groups, not merely by the presence or absence of technical barriers. When most of a child’s friends already have social media accounts, age-based restrictions without providing alternative, equivalent social spaces are likely to push children to become more creative in circumventing the rules, rather than accepting and complying with them.

This is not to say that technological approaches are entirely irrelevant or unnecessary. What deserves criticism is the positioning of technology as the sole solution, while the roles of family and education are treated only as supplementary elements in the policy narrative. The Deputy Minister himself did touch on the importance of parental involvement through companion account mechanisms, but the emphasis was far smaller compared to the stress placed on platform obligations. If the issue were approached more systemically, a sustainable solution would place three elements on an equal and mutually reinforcing footing: regulation and verification technology on the platform side, serious and progressive digital literacy education taught from an early age in schools, and active parental guidance backed by adequate understanding of their children’s digital world—not just repeated calls to ‘be more involved’ without concrete, actionable guidance.

Experience from other countries also shows that a single-pronged approach based on restriction tends to produce fragile, short-term effects. Age-restriction policies on social media in several nations have often been followed by reports of increased use of shared accounts or borrowed identities, a pattern similar to the findings in Indonesia today. This demonstrates that the age verification issue is not merely a technical challenge awaiting a more sophisticated algorithmic solution, but a social problem requiring a cross-sectoral approach.

As the first country in Southeast Asia to take such a bold step, Indonesia actually has the opportunity not just to follow a reactive pattern based solely on prohibition and verification, but to build a child protection model for the digital space that starts from a comprehensive understanding of why children behave as they do. As long as the government and the public continue to treat the 60 per cent figure merely as a technical challenge to be solved by smarter platform algorithms, we risk endlessly chasing symptoms without ever truly touching the root of the problem.