Pradipa P. Rasidi – With the enactment of Government Regulation 57 of 2025 on Electronic System Operators and Child Protection (PP TUNAS), the Indonesian government plans to restrict access to various digital platforms – from TikTok and Instagram to Roblox – for children under 16. The aim is to prevent cyberbullying, addiction, fraud, and other harmful content.
The regulation follows a similar step taken by Australia through the 2024 Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act, which also bans under-16s from having social media accounts.
While the intention behind this policy is commendable, the design has two critical flaws. It fails to learn from the merits and shortcomings of Australia's social media ban policy. More importantly, it misunderstands the role the internet plays in children's social lives.
Lessons from Australia
Like the Australian regulation, the Indonesian policy rationale stems from the way social media algorithms are designed to maximise engagement, often trapping users in a loop that resembles 'addiction.' This problem is real: social media is indeed designed to capture attention.
However, unlike the Australian regulation, the Indonesian one lacks an independent oversight committee. It is not clear how the Indonesian government will measure the regulation's effectiveness. Moreover, given Indonesia's long history of internet censorship, a centralised, top-down approach leaves the regulation highly vulnerable to political volatility.
The reported success of the Australian regulation has also been greatly overstated.
A YouGov survey found that parents reported positive impacts from the platform ban – such as children becoming more engaged in in-person interactions – but also that 27% said their children moved to less-regulated alternative platforms. That potentially increases risk, and, in fact, an eSafety Commission report of March 2026 mentioned that they have not seen significant decreases of internet abuse reported by children.
The YouGov survey also critically excludes the voices of Australian youth themselves. Many feel that parents misrepresent their internet use, and that the ban has deprived them of opportunities to develop problem-solving skills, and taken away a sense of belonging they cannot find through in-person interactions.
Social media as a public space
Indeed, the most problematic aspect of the social media ban policies rests on a deeper misunderstanding of the role the internet plays in children's everyday lives. Often, children are accused of being 'addicted' to social media and online games. The internet is perceived as a hostile space filled with lurking, malicious strangers. Yet rarely do we ask: what are children actually doing when they spend hours in front of their screens?
One answer is: they are seeking public space where they can socialise. Most children use the internet to connect with their friends. In Indonesia, children rarely have the opportunity to spend time with each other in person.
Cities have largely been built without considering children's needs: roads are dominated by fast-moving vehicles, while footpaths are often unsafe or inaccessible. According to UNICEF's framework, child-friendly cities require that children be able to move through social spaces without excessive dependence on adult supervision.
While the development of RPTRA in cities like Jakarta has significantly expanded children's access to public space, there are still gaps in ensuring safety and inclusivity. Safe spaces for children to play and socialise face-to-face remain severely constrained, and this can be compounded by social class.
Children in low-income neighbourhoods are restricted to play in areas near their homes, within a 100-meter radius at most. In urban Indonesia, the 'outside' has long been perceived as unsafe and hostile. Only the middle class can feel protected while navigating the 'outside' by driving private cars and hanging out in malls.
In Indonesia, this particular gap is what the internet fills. Through social media and online games, children interact with peers, form playgroups, and sustain friendships that move between digital and physical spaces. Without social media, where should they go?
Historically, in Indonesia, online games have also helped break down class boundaries, as real-life hierarchies are reconfigured in gaming spaces through the game's progression mechanics.
In Australia, online games and gaming communities have also become crucial spaces for LGBTQ+ youth to form connections and identities amidst discrimination.
Playing on gaming platforms such as Roblox, then, is never just about the game itself. What matters more is the social experience that accompanies it: what can be shared with friends through and about the game. This is why, in contemporary youth slang, they call it mabar (main bareng, playing together).
Without recognising this need, the regulation risks stripping children of their independence and reducing them to objects of compliance. To dismiss their experience as merely 'it's just a game' is to overlook children's capacity to build their own social spaces.
Big tech burden, not parents
The solution is not to place the burden back on parents to monitor their children's internet use – that has now become a luxury. Economic pressures have led more households to rely on both parents working full-time. Today, as many as 21.1 million university graduates take side jobs to make ends meet. Combined with domestic responsibilities, digital devices often become a practical substitute to keep children occupied with minimal parental supervision – electronic nannies.
The task of government is thus to address the structural conditions shaping children's lives. First, what needs to be regulated is platform design, not children's access. The addictive design in big tech platforms is real, and algorithmic effects and the data they extract to encourage the 'addiction' loop are not limited to children. They affect all users. So why restrict such measures to children only?
As advertising technology, big tech platforms are designed to deliver value to advertisers and, ultimately, reap the value themselves. Their recommendation systems are thus intended for user profiling and long-term use.
And if big tech platforms are really advertising technology, then requiring them to verify users' identities only worsens the problem. They must collect more personal data; ergo, expanding their very data extraction practices. Even more so, big tech themselves were suspected of lobbying for an age-verification policy, and in an increasingly authoritarian Indonesia, such extractive measures risk state access to user data to suppress dissent.
If the government is to regulate platforms, it should focus on regulating the mechanisms that make attention profitable, such as auto-refresh, endless scrolling, ad amplification, and algorithmic feeds.
The EU Digital Services Act, for example, requires big tec platforms to offer at least one recommender option that is not based on profiling. The examples already exist: Plurk, a Taiwan-based platform, relies on a simpler feed structure that is less aggressively optimised for engagement.
Broader socio-economic problems
Much of the government's involvement in digital culture has long been laser-focused on digital literacy. But digital technology cannot be understood solely in terms of information or cognitive skills. It also involves the much bigger question of political economy and well-being: how societies organise living space, working time, and family life.
A ban won't be a quick fix for a very complex problem. The government also needs to think a lot more about how to create conditions in which children have access to safe social spaces and greater opportunities for shared time with their families.