House Speaker Faustino "Bojie" Dy III and Majority Leader Ferdinand Alexander "Sandro" Marcos have filed House Bill 9965, the Children's Social Media Safety Act, which would bar children under 13 from holding social media accounts at all and require verifiable parental consent, active supervision, and default-on safety settings for users aged 13 to 17. Platforms that fail to act on prohibited-account complaints face fines of ₱5–10 million; broader violations of the law's obligations carry fines of ₱20–50 million, and repeat, serious violators risk temporary access restrictions or an outright ban on operating in the Philippines, subject to due process (GMA News; Digital Policy Alert).
The case for the bill
The strongest version of the case for HB 9965 is not hypothetical. GMA News reports the bill was filed roughly a week after a shooting at a Tacloban high school carried out by two minors, a tragedy that reignited debate in the Philippines about what unsupervised online life is doing to children's mental health and behavior. Separately, a New Mexico court found on August 6, 2026 that Meta "deceived users about Instagram and Facebook's safety and facilitated sexual exploitation of minors," ordering the company to pay $567 million on top of an earlier $375 million jury verdict, and imposing court-supervised limits including a ban on push notifications to youth between 10pm and 7am and a 90-hour monthly cap on youth platform use (The Record). Judge Bryan Biedscheid's opinion labeled Meta's platforms a "public nuisance." These are not manufactured harms. Legislators pushing HB 9965 can reasonably point to a body of litigation and lived incident that shows platforms have, at times, known about risks to minors and under-mitigated them. Requiring default-on privacy settings, restricting geolocation and financial features for children, and giving parents supervision tools are all measures that track what courts and regulators elsewhere have already found necessary.
Where the design runs into evidence
The trouble is that the Philippines is not proposing a new experiment — it is re-running one. Australia's Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024, the world's first hard age-floor law of this kind, set a 16-year minimum for social media accounts, put the compliance burden on platforms rather than parents, and set fines of up to A$49.5 million for systemic breaches (Prime Minister of Australia; Federal Register of Legislation). It took effect in December 2025. Three months later, roughly 81% of Australian under-16s were still reported to be using at least one age-restricted platform, down only modestly from about 86% before the ban — via VPNs, falsified age-verification photos, or migration to less-regulated apps (Al Jazeera). Platforms did revoke millions of accounts on paper, and Australian officials have since moved to tighten enforcement — but the headline result, six months in, is that a hard age gate backed by large fines produced a modest dip in usage, not the disappearance of underage accounts it promised.
HB 9965 borrows the same core mechanism — mandatory age verification, an absolute floor at a specific age, and large fines tied to non-compliance — without evidence that the verification technology genuinely closes the gap Australia is still fighting. Reliable age verification for a 12-year-old versus a 13-year-old is a much harder technical problem than most legislative debates acknowledge; the tools available (ID uploads, facial-age estimation) are exactly the tools Australian teenagers have already learned to spoof. Building that verification infrastructure also means every Filipino social media user, not just children, eventually interacts with an age-assurance layer that did not previously exist — a real privacy and access cost for a compliance rate that, on the Australian evidence, still leaves a large majority of the targeted group unaffected.
A narrower path that has already worked
The more promising thread in HB 9965 is not the age floor — it is the platform-obligation layer: default-highest privacy settings for minors, restrictions on geolocation and financial features, and mandated parental tools. These require no new verification bureaucracy and target the actual mechanisms of harm rather than age itself. The New Mexico case shows a second lever that doesn't need new legislation at all: enforcing existing consumer-protection and tort law against platforms that misrepresent their safety features to users. That case produced concrete, court-ordered product changes — overnight notification limits, usage caps, mandatory safety disclosures — without Congress ever passing an age-verification statute.
Lawmakers in Manila have a real problem to solve, and the fine schedule in HB 9965 signals they intend to be taken seriously. But Congress should decouple the parts of the bill that make platforms safer by design from the part that bets on an age wall Australia's own regulator is still trying to make work. A law that mandates safety defaults and gives platforms genuine liability exposure for deceptive safety claims — enforceable by the National Privacy Commission and NTC without a new verification mandate — would likely deliver more of the protection lawmakers want, sooner, and without conscripting every adult Filipino user into an age-check regime built to catch children who, per Australia's experience, mostly find a way around it anyway.