Communications Minister Fahmi Fadzil says under-16 social media rules aim to stop children from communicating with unknown adults, not watching online content.
PETALING JAYA: The government is not seeking to stop children from watching content on platforms such as YouTube or TikTok, but wants to prevent them from communicating with unknown adults online, Communications Minister Datuk Fahmi Fadzil told the Dewan Rakyat today.
He said the concern was not children viewing online content, but the risk of adults using social media accounts to approach and exploit them.
“We are not banning them from watching. What we do not want is for children to communicate with unknown adults. That is what we want to stop,” he said.
Fahmi said this in reply to Syed Saddiq Syed Abdul Rahman (Muda–Muar), who asked whether exemptions could be considered under the under-16 social media account restriction, particularly for platforms such as YouTube, which contain educational material.
Syed Saddiq also suggested an opt-in system in which children below 16 would generally be barred from owning accounts, but parents could manage child safety accounts, with legal responsibility placed on the parents.
Fahmi said the suggestions were good and had been discussed between the Communications Ministry, the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) and social media platforms.
He said, in principle, the government did not prevent parents from opening accounts for their children, but wanted parental controls to be in place.
Fahmi cited a case in Sabah several months ago in which a man was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment for raping a 15-year-old child whom he had befriended through TikTok.
He said the case showed how a child’s social media account could be used by an adult to build contact before the child was sexually assaulted.
“This is what we do not want to happen. We do not want children to become victims,” he said.
Fahmi said digital literacy among parents needed to be improved, adding that the government had begun doing so last year through the Safe Internet campaign.
He said platforms such as YouTube and TikTok could still be accessed for viewing content, but the government wanted safeguards to prevent children from being approached by unknown adults.
Fahmi said the government was applying a single standard to all platforms for now, but hoped ongoing discussions with social media companies would yield positive results to better protect children online.
