Indonesia's Ministry of Communication and Digital Affairs (Komdigi), under Minister Meutya Hafid, has confirmed it is drafting regulations to restrict children's access to social media — explicitly citing Australia's under-16 ban as a template. The proposal under discussion would set a minimum age for social media use and place age-verification obligations on platforms such as TikTok, Meta and X. For a country of roughly 280 million people, with one of the world's youngest and most digitally engaged populations, this is one of the most consequential internet policy decisions of the decade.
There is a legitimate concern at the heart of the debate. Indonesian parents, like parents everywhere, worry about scams, harassment, predatory content and compulsive use. Komdigi is right to take those concerns seriously. But the policy being floated — a blanket, identity-verified age gate enforced by platforms — would not solve those problems. It would, however, create new and serious harms for free expression, privacy and Indonesia's digital economy. Jakarta should take a hard look at the early evidence from Australia before locking in the same model.
The Australian template is already wobbling
Australia's Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act, passed in late 2024, makes Australia the first democracy to legally bar under-16s from holding social media accounts and to fine platforms up to AUD 49.5 million for systemic failures to enforce that limit. The law was sold as a child-protection measure, but its design was rushed: it passed in roughly a week of parliamentary debate, with no completed age-assurance trial and no clarity on which services would be in scope.
Australia's own eSafety Commissioner has since had to write the rules essentially in real time, and the government's age-assurance technology trial — meant to determine whether the law is even technically feasible — has produced mixed and cautious results. Civil-society groups in Australia, the U.S. and Europe have been blunt: the evidence base for age-based social media bans is thin. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation argued in May 2026, lawmakers are racing to regulate teen social media use on the basis of weak and contested science, often confusing correlation with causation in the youth mental-health literature.
Age verification is not a neutral technology
The core technical problem is unavoidable: you cannot reliably verify that a user is over 16 without effectively verifying who they are. That means either uploading a government ID, submitting a biometric face scan, or routing every Indonesian user through a centralised age-assurance system. Each option creates a permanent identity-linkage layer on top of services that were previously usable pseudonymously.
For Indonesia specifically, that is a poor trade. The country is still recovering from the 2022 BSSN leak that exposed records on an estimated 1.3 billion SIM registrations and a 2023 breach of the Dukcapil civil-registry system involving an estimated 337 million records. Pushing TikTok, Meta and X to collect or verify identity documents for every account holder would multiply the attack surface for the very data that has repeatedly leaked. Even if verification is done by a third party, the metadata — "this device, this number, this child, on this app" — still has to live somewhere.
It is also a free-expression problem. Indonesia's UU ITE (Law No. 11/2008, amended in 2024) already gives the state broad powers over online content, and the 2020 MR5 ministerial regulation requires platforms to register as Private Electronic System Operators and remove flagged content within hours. Layering age-verified identity on top of that framework brings Indonesia closer to a fully de-anonymised internet — a structural shift that disproportionately silences activists, LGBTQ+ users, religious minorities and journalists, not children.
What the evidence actually shows
The strongest claim made for under-16 bans is that they will improve youth mental health. The science does not support that claim with the confidence the rhetoric implies. The U.S. Surgeon General's 2023 advisory called for more research, not a ban. A 2024 Nature commentary by Candice Odgers and colleagues explicitly cautioned that the evidence linking social media to teen mental-health decline is mixed and largely correlational. Banning is a strong intervention; the evidence justifying it is weak.
Meanwhile, the costs of getting this wrong in Indonesia are concrete:
- Economic. The digital economy is projected by the e-Conomy SEA 2024 report (Google/Temasek/Bain) to reach roughly USD 90 billion in Indonesia in 2024 and USD 200-360 billion by 2030. Much of that growth runs through MSMEs that reach customers via Instagram, TikTok Shop and WhatsApp. Identity-gating those services slows onboarding and excludes informal sellers.
- Educational. Indonesian teenagers use YouTube, TikTok and Discord for tutoring, language learning and creator economies. A blanket cutoff treats those uses as identical to compulsive scrolling.
- Civic. Under-16s are part of the public. Banning them from social platforms removes them from civic conversation rather than equipping them to navigate it.
A more proportionate path
Indonesia does not need to choose between doing nothing and copying Canberra. A proportionate package would focus on platform design and parental tooling, not blanket identity verification: enforce existing duties under PP 71/2019 and MR5 against the worst harms (CSAM, scams, non-consensual intimate imagery); require platforms to offer robust, default-on safety settings for accounts flagged as minors; mandate transparent reporting on recommender-system risks to under-18s; and invest in digital-literacy curricula through the Ministry of Education and Culture, building on the existing Gerakan Nasional Literasi Digital programme.
That approach addresses the underlying harms without forcing 280 million Indonesians to prove their identity to log in. Komdigi has an opportunity to lead — by showing the region that child safety online is achievable without dismantling the open, pseudonymous internet that Indonesia's creators, entrepreneurs and dissidents depend on. Australia's experiment is the warning, not the model.