The Urgent Need for Caution in Social Media Restriction Policies for Children

If one observes carefully—from the corners of coffee shops, alleyways in residential complexes, children in their rooms, to rows of seats in shopping centres—one almost always finds the sight of children glued to their devices, fingers dancing nimbly across their mobile phone screens. This phenomenon has become almost a new sociological norm in the country. Yet beneath the silence of children who appear “well-behaved,” there is a process of cognitive degradation at work, shaping the memory structures and collective behaviour of our future generation.

For this reason, I consider the presence of the Ministry of Communication and Digital Regulation No. 9 of 2026 concerning the Implementation of Government Regulation No. 17/2025 on the Administration of Electronic Systems in Child Protection—known as the Tunas Regulation—worthy of appreciation as a manifestation of the state’s willingness to intervene actively in the digital space that has hitherto been left as a directionless wasteland.

As an observer who has witnessed intensely how technology often races ahead of moral and legal readiness, the government’s step should be welcomed with optimism and enthusiasm on one hand, but simultaneously with critical-analytical intellectual vigilance on the other.

Certainly, we cannot turn a blind eye to the troubling data that has accumulated. Our children are not merely browsing the internet; the majority of them spend an average of five hours or more daily online. Most of that time is spent consuming content controlled by manipulative algorithms from each platform they use, rather than for learning purposes. More alarming still, we rank fourth in the world for access to pornographic material, and at least 80,000 children under ten years old have been drawn into the vortex of online gambling.

In this context of digital emergency, the decision to restrict social media access for children under 16 through the Tunas Regulation is a heroic and sportsmanlike step. The government has finally ceased being a passive observer and begun erecting protective barriers for the quality of Indonesian humanity towards 2045.

However, this support must not blind us to the technical mechanisms chosen. The Tunas Regulation introduces an extremely radical age verification system by integrating the National Identity Number (NIK) and biometric scanning. This is where a stark philosophical difference emerges when compared with similar policies in Australia.

In the Land Down Under, their legislation cherishes privacy by prohibiting platforms from forcing national official identity as the sole verification method. Conversely, Indonesia has chosen a path of identity sovereignty centralised on the state. Technically, this indeed provides far stronger legal certainty to ensure that no nine-year-old child can forge their age when registering an account. However, from a sociopolitical perspective, the government is constructing an architecture of digital identity that is deeply intimate with the state from an early age.