Child Advocate Hopes Tunas Regulation Effectively Protects Children in Digital Space
Tanjungpinang (ANTARA) - Child advocate from Riau Islands Province (Kepri), Ery Syahrial, hopes that the presence of Government Regulation Number 17 of 2025 on the Governance of Electronic System Services in Child Protection (PP Tunas) will effectively protect Indonesian children in the digital space.
According to Ery, children from birth to the age of 16 are vulnerable and require protection, especially from high-risk social media content such as pornography, violence, cyberbullying, and gambling.
“We must support the government through the Ministry of Communication and Digital (Komdigi), which has issued PP Tunas, by limiting social media access for children under 16 years old,” Ery said in Batam on Friday.
He stated that unfiltered social media content would be very dangerous for children, families, and the Indonesian nation to access, as there have already been many cases of children becoming perpetrators or victims of crimes due to the negative influence of the digital world.
Therefore, PP Tunas is expected to ensure the safety of children amid the digital era filled with various negative content, criminal acts, and threats of mental and psychological disturbances to children.
“Hopefully, PP Tunas can steer children’s minds away from being poisoned by harmful social media content that endangers their future,” he said.
He mentioned that in advanced countries like the United States, they have already implemented restrictions on social media access for minors. Although Indonesia is a bit late, the government’s step to issue PP Tunas deserves appreciation and full support.
What remains, according to Ery, is for the government to regulate the technical aspects of social media restrictions in the future so as not to limit children’s digital access entirely, because children also have the right to obtain and disseminate positive information in the digital era.
He also encouraged the government to prepare special digital channels that can support children’s creativity, including the use of shared social media accounts, for example, between parents and children so that parents can monitor the accounts accessed by children on social media.
“So far, we do not yet know the details of the technical implementation of PP Tunas, whether children aged 16 and under are completely prohibited from accessing social media, or exceptions are made for certain matters,” Ery added.
Recently, Minister of Communication and Digital (Menkomdigi) Meutya Hafid stated that Meta, the technology company owning Facebook, Threads, and Instagram, is willing to restrict the minimum age for children to 16 years to access their social media platforms in accordance with PP Tunas.