Globe Telecom Backs Regulating Social Media Access for Under-16s

Globe Telecom Inc. is backing tighter social media rules for children under 16 instead of a blanket ban on their accounts. The Philippines’ biggest platforms are pushing the identical argument.

The telco-turned-tech giant threw its support this week behind a House push to tighten platform rules, aligning itself with Meta, Google and TikTok, three companies with a direct stake in how many young Filipinos keep logging in. Congress, meanwhile, is juggling more than a dozen rival bills that disagree on almost everything except the urgency.

Globe Casts Child Safety as Everyone’s Job

Globe Telecom Inc., the Philippines’ telco-turned-tech giant, opposed legislative proposals that would keep everyone 18 and under off social media, Philstar.com reported this week. Instead, it backed Pasig City Representative Roman Romulo’s push for tighter platform rules over an outright cutoff.

Romulo chairs the House technical working group reviewing the various ban bills. “We know that it is difficult to ban because you can’t monitor children at home,” he said at a recent Kapihan sa Manila Bay briefing. He wants parents carrying more of that load, though he admits Congress still has to work out how.

Globe general counsel Froilan Castelo described keeping children safe online as a job shared among families, schools and platforms. He pointed to tools already running at Globe and elsewhere, age authentication, content moderation, reporting channels, as evidence platforms are doing their part. Castelo echoed a warning from the American Chamber of Commerce of the Philippines (AmCham) that a hard ban could push children toward unregulated corners of the internet; Amnesty International raised a similar concern separately.

The stance fits a pattern for Globe, which already runs its own gadget-use partnership with the Department of Education focused on classroom habits.

Meta, Google and TikTok Like This Plan Too

The Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) wants new rules in force by the third quarter of 2026, Secretary Henry Aguda has said, modeled on Australia’s age-restriction framework and on Singapore’s approach to content moderation. Industry is already shaping that model from the inside. TikTok is pushing for a lower age threshold than the 16-year floor Congress is weighing, according to legal-risk news service MLex.

There is plenty at stake for platforms built on daily use. Filipinos spend an average of 54 hours a week online, and the country counted 98 million internet users, 83.8% of the population, in the most recent tally. For platforms whose ad revenue depends on keeping teenagers logged in and scrolling, a rule that dials down behavior costs less than one that switches an account off entirely.

A Tacloban Shooting Compressed the Timeline

The debate accelerated after a school shooting in Tacloban City left three children dead and 20 others injured, allegedly at the hands of two minors aged 14 and 15. Investigators are examining what role violent video games and social media played.

Eight days later, House Speaker Faustino Dy III and Majority Leader Ferdinand “Sandro” Marcos filed House Bill 9965, the Children’s Social Media Safety Act. It bans children under 13 from holding accounts outright and requires parental consent and active supervision for those 13 to 17. Senate President Sherwin Gatchalian, who had already filed his own under-16 ban in April, said young Filipinos are getting hooked on social media and violent games, pointing to studies linking heavy use with rising youth mental health problems.

Some of the harm cited in Congress is specific enough to unsettle any parent. Groomers typically approach children first on games like Roblox, build trust, then move the conversation to private channels before the abuse begins, Philstar reported, citing the pattern investigators are tracking in ongoing cases.

• 66% of Filipino children aged 10 to 16 used social media in the three months before the 2024 Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) and DICT household survey, according to Gatchalian’s own citation of the data.
• 92.4% of connected children in that age group keep a social media account, versus 97.6% of internet users 17 and older.
• Fines under HB 9965 range from ₱5 million to ₱50 million, scaled to how serious and how repeated the violation is.

Every camp in Manila agrees the current situation is unsafe. They disagree sharply on the fix.

Thirteen Bills, Five More, Still No Single Number

By Rappler’s tally in May, the House had at least 13 bills addressing minors’ social media use, with five more pending in the Senate. They disagree on the one figure that matters most: what counts as a child.

Gatchalian filed his own ban for accounts under 16 back in April, months before Suarez introduced a regulation-only alternative for older teens. Suarez’s bill draws the sharpest line against the ban camp.

We are not banning technology or restricting children’s rights to learn and express themselves. Social media and the internet have opened up tremendous opportunities for Filipino youth to learn, create, connect with others, and access information.

Suarez told the Daily Tribune, defending a design that caps fines at ₱100 million (about $1.63 million) for repeated, serious violations and stops short of banning any age group outright.

Australia and Indonesia Already Ran This Experiment

The Philippines would not be first. Two neighbors already tried versions of this, with results Congress is still digesting.

• Australia’s Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act took effect on December 10, 2025, raising the account age to 16 across platforms including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Snapchat, with fines up to 49.5 million dollars for noncompliant platforms.
• Indonesia began enforcing restrictions on “high-risk” platforms, including TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, for under-16 users on March 28, 2026, the first such move in Southeast Asia.
• Malaysia is drafting a comparable law, part of the regional wave that Philippine lawmakers cite directly in their own bill texts.

Early evidence out of Australia complicates the picture. A paper in Nature Human Behaviour warned the law’s focus on targeting accounts instead of harmful content may limit its effectiveness, since logged-out users still get algorithm-driven feeds without the parental controls a registered account would carry.

Would Age Verification Even Work Here?

Not easily. Age verification in the Philippines would likely lean on government IDs or biometric data, and information-security professionals warn the country’s active market for rented and sold identities could let minors slip through the very system meant to stop them, while VPNs offer an entirely separate workaround.

Luis Jacinto, president of an association of Philippine information-security professionals, called restricting access “an impractical solution” for preventing real-world violence. He warned the country’s active market for rented and sold IDs would undercut any verification system built on government identification, and that submitting IDs to private platforms would widen the attack surface for cybercriminals already exploiting past government data leaks.

Self-reporting has a poor track record elsewhere. In Australia, 84% of under-13s already using social media despite a minimum age of 13 that predated the current ban, researchers found, a reminder that an age gate alone rarely changes behavior without enforcement technology behind it.

CitizenWatch Philippines has raised a related concern. Kit Belmonte, the group’s co-convenor and a former Quezon City representative, said Congress still needs to work out how compliance would even be verified across companies based outside the country.

Romulo’s technical working group resumed hearings this week, aiming to reconcile the rival bills before the DICT’s own target of having new rules in place by the third quarter of 2026.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is social media currently banned for children under 16 in the Philippines?

Not yet. Congress has at least thirteen House bills and five Senate measures pending, ranging from Senate President Sherwin Gatchalian’s outright ban on accounts for under-16s to Deputy Speaker David Jay-Jay Suarez’s regulation-only approach for 16 to 18 year olds, and no single version has cleared both chambers.

What age do Filipino children typically start using the internet and social media?

A 2020 UNICEF study found Filipino children first go online around age 10 on average, and that age keeps slipping lower. By the time they reach 16 to 17, survey data compiled by ECPAT International shows 97 percent are using social media on a weekly basis.

Do boys and girls use social media differently in the Philippines?

Yes. A UNICEF survey of Filipino children found nine in ten girls use Facebook compared with eight in ten boys, while about one in five girls use Instagram against roughly one in ten boys.

Would an age ban actually stop kids from using platforms?

Child privacy researchers are skeptical. Megan Iorio, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, has argued that minors will find their way back onto platforms through parental consent or circumvention and face the same risks, and pointed to a US case where Meta and YouTube were found liable for addictive design features.

Do Meta, Google and TikTok support the Philippine proposals?

At a Senate hearing on five related bills in February, representatives of Meta, Google and TikTok joined the Department of Justice, the Cybercrime Investigation and Coordination Center and the Philippine Psychological Association in backing an age-appropriate framework over a blanket ban.

How does the Philippine proposal compare with Australia’s social media age rule?

Australia’s law is technically a delay, not a ban. It carries no penalty for under-16 users or their parents; only platforms that fail to take reasonable steps to block underage accounts face fines. Several Philippine bills follow that same platform-only penalty model.