🚨 Digital Rights Alert! Indonesia becomes first Southeast Asian country to ban social media for users under 16

At Manushya Foundation, we reaffirm our stance on age-gating as an anti-poor policy that fails to address the material, root conditions of young people's suffering.

Following Australia's social media ban late last year, Indonesia has become the first Southeast Asian country to take a drastic and sweeping step, thrusting itself into a growing global battle over who controls what children see, hear and consume online. Starting 28th March, under a banner of ‘digital emergency’, the Indonesian government prohibits children under 16 from ‘high-risk’ social media platforms including, but not limited to, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok and Instagram. 

Indonesia's social media ban comes at a time when the state's relationship with digital platforms is already defined with repression and censorship. During the wave of protests that swept across Indonesian cities last year, we have seen how student activists were criminalised simply for posting online. Similarly, in 2022, the government authorised a set of Internet regulations which granted authorities the power to fine or block any platform that fails to comply with the state’s demands to remove content deemed ‘unlawful’. Indonesia’s social media must be understood within this complex digital environment that the government unleashed. A government that has already demonstrated its willingness to silence protest, criminalise dissent and weaponise content moderation against its own people cannot maintain the fiction of paternalism for long. 

As decolionial and intersectional feminists, we at Manushya Foundation acknowledge the growing concerns surrounding cyberbullying, addiction and the predatory mechanics of BigTech algorithms. The same foundations which Indonesia’s social media ban is said to be anchored on. These are real, well-documented harms, and we do not dismiss the urgency of addressing them. But we refuse to accept the premise that age-gating is the solution.

Age-gating is just a tactic to deflect responsibility, reinforce control on bodies and identities; and consolidate power. As we have said in the past, the suffering of young people did not originate online. They are grounded in poverty, discrimination, broken education systems, an economy rigged to reward the rich with endless tax breaks and politics designed to divide and conquer. 

Age-gating does not regulate the algorithm nor does it break up the corporate monopolies. It does not tax the billionaires who profit from the attention economy. It does not fund mental health services, rebuild communities or address the loneliness epidemic that makes young people vulnerable in the first place. What it does do is surveil, restrict and control. And does so most brutally against those who have the least. Working class children will bear the brunt of age gating policies, and the repercussions will be long-lasting. For working class children, social media is often the primary means to access food, educational opportunities, build community and seek support.

Age-gating is anti-poor.

It is the children who have the least who are asked to pay the highest price for a half-baked policy designed with someone else’s child in mind. The innocence that these policies claim to protect is only reserved to those who can buy their way out of justice.

That innocence is never extended to poor, migrant, racialised minorities whose whole identities have always been met with incarceration, surveillance and neglect. It is beyond absurd to offer age-gating as a response to the very real pain of young people.

Indonesian children, much like the children of Australia and of the world, deserve a world worth logging on to. 

🔗 Read Manushya Foundation’s stance on Age-Gating: https://www.manushyafoundation.org/manushya-s-statement-on-age-gating