Indonesia blocks 4.8 million underage social media accounts but are kids any safer?
Without a regulator, Indonesia’s child online safety rules require digital platforms to assess and remove underage accounts themselves
But analysts and digital rights advocates say the real question is not how many accounts have disappeared, but whether those removals can be verified and if they have actually made children safer online.
By late June, the figures reported by platforms to Indonesia’s Ministry of Communication and Digital Affairs (Komdigi) included about 4.1 million suspected underage accounts on TikTok, 600,000 on YouTube and 185,000 on Meta’s Facebook, Instagram and Threads.
Yet the same numbers that have given the government early compliance headlines also expose the central weakness of the policy, critics say: enforcement depends heavily on platforms to identify underage users, report their own compliance and decide how age checks should work.
“Honestly, the 4.8 million figure looks like enforcement, but what it really shows is dependence,” said Ika Idris, a Monash University Indonesia public policy scholar who researches social media analytics and digital platform policy. “Right now, ‘enforcement’ means platforms grading their own homework and the regulator accepting the grade.”