The Philippine House of Representatives is drafting legislation that would impose an outright ban on social media and online gaming use by children aged 13 and below, while placing tighter regulations on users aged 14 to 17, local media reported Sunday, as lawmakers move to address growing concern over children’s online safety.
House Speaker Faustino “Bojie” Dy III and Majority Leader Ferdinand Alexander “Sandro” Marcos earlier proposed House Bill 9965, the Children’s Social Media Safety Act, which would bar children under 13 from holding social media accounts and impose fines of up to 50 million pesos ($820,000) on platforms that fail to meet child-safety standards such as age verification and parental controls. The bill was filed days after a school shooting in Tacloban City involving two minor suspects, aged 15 and 14, that left three children dead and 20 injured.
Under the proposed measure, platforms would be required to apply the highest privacy and safety settings by default for underage users, restrict their ability to share location data or make financial transactions, and limit the collection of children’s biometric and other sensitive personal data. Fines for platforms that fail to act on requests to remove prohibited accounts would range from 5 million to 10 million pesos, with penalties of up to 50 million pesos for repeated or serious violations, potentially including a temporary or permanent ban on operating in the Philippines.
A parallel measure in the Senate, filed by Senate President Sherwin Gatchalian, would go further, barring social media use by anyone under 16. Gatchalian has said the proposal responds to growing evidence linking unsupervised social media use among children to mental health and behavioral problems, a concern echoed by the Philippine Pediatric Society and the Philippine Society for Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics.
Not all lawmakers support an outright ban. Pasig Rep. Roman Romulo, who heads a House technical working group reviewing the proposals, has argued for regulation over prohibition, saying a ban would be difficult to enforce and that parents should instead be given greater responsibility for monitoring their children’s online activity.
The debate places the Philippines among a growing number of countries considering age restrictions on social media use, following Malaysia’s move to bar children under 16 from registering accounts and similar legislative efforts elsewhere in the region.
