JAKARTA: The Communications and Digital Ministry will block social media accounts owned by underage children as soon as the minimum age limit policy takes place in March, promising immediate action on online platforms for users under 18 years old.
The ministry is finishing up a ministerial regulation that will serve as the technical guideline for Government Regulation (PP) No. 17/2025 on electronic systems providers (PSE) governance for child protection (PP Tunas).
The ministerial regulation is slated to be issued and implemented next month, a year after President Prabowo Subianto signed the PP in March 2025, said Communications and Digital Minister Meutya Hafid during a visit to The Jakarta Post on Thursday (Feb 19).
The latest draft for the ministerial regulation, which was released in January for public consultation, outlined several key provisions, including a minimum age limit for users in digital products and sanctions for platforms found violating the rule.
In the regulation, age restrictions are divided into several categories, with children under 13 only permitted to use platforms designed specifically for their age group.
Meanwhile, people aged 13 to 16 can access only low-risk platforms.
All groups need parental consent to access the platforms. The risks are identified based on various factors, such as exposure to strangers, violent or pornographic content, as well as addictive features.
When the ministerial regulation will be issued in March, users younger than 16 years old could be removed from digital platforms, said Meutya.
“We must do that,” the minister said on Thursday.
“Our target is that by the time we implement the policy in March, we are able to lock out [underage users] from the platforms.”
She added that discussions were still ongoing on the maximum transition period for platforms to comply with the age limit requirements. But Meutya said it would not take long.
“Indonesia is so big in size. We couldn’t immediately remove tens of millions of children’s accounts,” Meutya said.
“But at least for big platforms, we’ll ask them to remove the accounts on a large scale.”
Indonesia’s intensified effort at imposing minimum age requirements for social media and digital platforms closely follows Australia, which in December officially became the first country to impose a social media ban for children under 16 years old.
Platforms face fines of up to A$49.5 million (US$32 million) if found to have violated the rule.
In contrast to Australia’s ban, Indonesia is aiming for the children's age limit to widely cover all PSEs, including online games and e-commerce platforms.
Such wide coverage, according to Meutya, is important as the rapid transformation in digital products has blurred the line between social media platforms and other online sites due to their overlapping features, such as chat messaging features.
“By the time we were drafting the regulation [in 2025], most PSEs had converged with each other, with games having their own social features and vice versa,” the minister went on to say.
Since the PP Tunas issuance, critics have cautiously welcomed the policy, with child advocates and digital experts highlighting the importance of such regulations to prevent cases of child grooming and overexposure to violent content, among other problems.
Beltsazar Krisetya, a researcher at Jakarta-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), appreciated the regulation’s attempt to go beyond Australia’s blanket ban.
“PP Tunas [appears to] go deeper into design-level concerns: regulating dark patterns, banning default profiling and demanding privacy from the get-go,” said Beltsazar, who is also a visiting fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore, on Thursday.
“Its tiered age restriction can help reduce the risk of children’s personal data being exploited by third parties,” he went on to say.
But Beltsazar called for further scrutiny of the parental consent mechanism for PSEs. In its mandatory risk assessments, PP Tunas stipulates that PSEs may apply protection designs that allow parents to give their children access to the platform
“For children in difficult or absent home environments, handing access control to a parent is not protection, though this problem is not unique to Indonesia,” he said.
The researcher further called for the ministerial regulation’s early implementation in March to serve as a period to “collect feedback and evaluate where children [digitally] migrate to and whether the consent-giving process is working”. - The Jakarta Post/ANN
