Singapore considers mandatory safeguards for teenage social-media users
Singapore is considering mandatory safeguards for teenage social-media users, including daily time limits and safer defaults for features such as infinite scroll, autoplay, unsolicited contact and algorithmic feeds. The measures would be supported by age checks and legislative changes expected in 2027.
What it could improve
The direction is promising because it moves responsibility away from parents alone and towards the services that design young people’s digital experiences. Safer defaults could introduce natural stopping points, reduce unwanted interactions and make digital wellbeing a product-design responsibility rather than an optional setting.
What remains unresolved
Platform-by-platform safeguards still depend on reliable recognition of young users, can require repeated age checks and cannot create consistent protection across the wider range of services children use.
- Children may retain existing accounts, declare a false age, create another account or use someone else’s account. Australia’s early evaluation found reported use among under-16s declined only from 85.9% to 81.5% after three months; its regulator also cited incomplete or ineffective age assurance by platforms.
- Without an interoperable assurance mechanism, each service may perform its own age check. That can create repeated verification, inconsistent decisions and unnecessary collection of identity documents, facial data or behavioural information.
- A platform can make its own service safer, but it cannot extend those safeguards to another social network, website, messaging service, game, unmanaged application or AI service.
The Child-Friendly Internet perspective
Child-appropriate safeguards can follow a recognised account across devices and networks within the same platform. They do not automatically follow the child across different services, accounts or signed-out experiences. A Child-Friendly Internet ecosystem could provide a consistent, privacy-preserving child-assurance signal that participating services recognise—without repeatedly discovering or unnecessarily exposing the child’s identity.
- Keep the service-level safeguards: age-appropriate defaults, healthier interaction design and reduced persuasive features are important improvements.
- Use privacy-preserving assurance that communicates only the required age or developmental band, rather than routinely disclosing the child’s identity.
- Make assurance interoperable so participating services can respond consistently instead of repeating age verification independently.
- Extend the model beyond named social-media platforms so protection can support the wider digital environment in which children learn, play and communicate.