Philippine Senate passes bill to ban under-18s from social media accounts

The Philippine Senate has approved a bill that would ban anyone aged 17 or under from creating a social media account, and would require accounts held by minors to be disabled or suspended.

Senate Bill 2424, the proposed Safe Media Access and Responsible Technology for Kids in Digital Spaces Act, known as the Smart Kids Act, was passed by the Senate earlier this week. It seeks to restrict children and young people aged 17 and below from accessing social media, along with other digital applications and websites that the bill classifies as harmful.

Senator Robinhood Padilla, who spoke about the bill on Sunday on Super Radyo dzBB, said the measure should be put into effect without delay because social media has already done a great deal of damage to young Filipinos, especially minors. He listed bullying, what he described as numerous suicide cases, and mass shootings including school shootings, saying these problems had piled up on top of one another over time.

The senator said the bill targets the interactive side of the platforms rather than the content alone. What the proposal would forbid, he explained, is social media interaction itself: minors talking and messaging with other people. He argued that this is where much of the damage lies, and pointed in particular to cases in which women and girls become victims of problems involving nude photographs. "It has really gone too far," he said.

Two chambers, two age limits

The bill now sits alongside a parallel effort in the lower chamber. The House of Representatives has passed its own version of the measure on second reading. The two drafts differ on one central point: the House version would prohibit children aged 13 and below from opening social media accounts, while the Senate bill draws the line at 17.

The bill's progress will be watched closely by families in the United Kingdom, where debates about restricting children's access to social media and about harm to children online have run along similar lines, though through regulation rather than an outright ban.

Padilla did not back every proposal put forward in the wider debate. He said he opposed a separate suggestion that social media platforms should be required to obtain a franchise, a form of operating licence, to serve users in the country. Such a requirement would be excessive, he argued, and could anger the public.

What happens next

For the Smart Kids Act to become law, the Senate and the House would need to reconcile their two versions, which currently set different age limits, before final approval in both chambers. No date for that process was given in the reporting of the senator's remarks.

Background: how other countries are acting

The Philippine bill is part of a wider shift by governments towards limiting what platforms can offer children. In the European Union, the European Commission sent preliminary findings to TikTok on 24 July 2026 stating that accounts for under-18s do not meet the safety standards of the Digital Services Act, because young users could set their accounts to public, allowing content from 16 and 17 year olds to be recommended to any user. The United Kingdom has taken a regulatory route: under the Online Safety Act 2023, services that children are likely to use must stop them seeing the most harmful content, including pornography and material that pushes self-harm or suicide, assess the risks to children, and keep them away from other harmful material in an age-appropriate way, with Ofcom as the regulator. In the United States, a Los Angeles jury found in March 2026 that Meta, the owner of Instagram, and Google, the owner of YouTube, had been negligent in the design or operation of their platforms and in failing to warn, in the case of a young woman known as K.G.M.

Update, 12 October 2026

The House of Representatives approved its bill on Monday by a large majority, sending it into reconciliation talks with the Senate before a final version goes to President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. On Sunday, President Marcos said he had reviewed the Senate-approved bill and warned that a sweeping ban could push children to hide their online activity, exposing them to grooming and abuse. The report linked the debate to three school shootings in the Philippines since June, including one last month in which a 16-year-old killed at least two fellow pupils before taking his own life, and one in August in which a student fired on a classmate before doing the same. TikTok, Alphabet and Meta Platforms did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the House vote. Regionally, Malaysia began in June barring under-16s from registering accounts, with platforms given until January 2027 to implement age checks, while Indonesia issued a rule in March requiring high-risk platforms to deactivate under-16 accounts; by last week TikTok had deactivated around 9 million such accounts in Indonesia, with Meta blocking 85,000 Instagram and 99,000 Facebook accounts.

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