Report from Channel News Asia
In Brief – Malaysia’s aggressive online-safety framework goes into operation with new rules effective June 1. The regulations issued by the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) require online platforms to adopt age-verification systems ensuring only users aged 16 and above can register for services and access age-appropriate features. Platforms must verify user ages through government-issued identification documents such as national identity cards, passports, or birth certificates. The new Child Protection Code imposes sweeping “safe design” obligations on platforms to protect young users, including preventing children from accessing harmful content, limiting contact between adults and minors, and reducing features that encourage prolonged use by children. A parallel Risk Mitigation Code for platforms requires annual harmful-content risk assessments, stronger moderation and advertiser-verification systems, and ongoing algorithmic oversight.
Context – One of the unwritten rules of global digital regulation is that giant platforms will implement national rules in countries with big, growing and important domestic markets. Malaysia fits the bill. Online age limits and age checks are on the march globally. Australia’s 16-year-old age threshold for holding social media accounts is the highest profile example, and officials in countries like France, Spain, and the UK have called for similar age limits, but Malaysia’s regulations are another reminder that age limits are also being proposed in developing countries such as Indonesia, India, Ecuador and Egypt. Many of them have younger populations and more authoritarian governments. Keeping younger people off alternative media and communications platforms until their late teens is a noteworthy byproduct. Before age-checking social media to get teens off their phones became vogue, stopping access to porn was the headline online age checking justification, for example in France and the US. Long-held concerns of privacy and civil liberty advocates to online verification regimes are failing to stem the tide.