JAKARTA (Reuters) – Armed with a smartphone, Anza Zafran Utama, a 9-year-old boy in the Indonesian city of Bogor, is either a dinosaur or a shooter, depending on his mood.
Zafran and his friends regularly hang out on Roblox, the US platform where children can build immersive 3-D worlds and communities, but from Saturday under-16s are set to be restricted from using the platform under new government rules, after officials designated it high risk.
“I like to joke around with my friends there,” Zafran said of Roblox.
His mother, Andina Dwi, said he spends as long as four hours on the platform after school, getting up only to charge his phone.
“When he plays Roblox he forgets time,” said Andina, 32, who supports the controls.
Indonesia’s social media curbs, which the government says are intended to reduce the risk of cyberbullying and addiction, follow a ban in Australia last year over concerns about social media’s potential harms to young people’s mental health. In the US, where social media companies face thousands of lawsuits over their platform designs, a court on Thursday found Meta and Alphabet’s YouTube created addictive products that caused harm to young people.
Indonesia has also designated platforms including X, Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, owned by China’s ByteDance, as high risk.
But as the clock ticks down to Saturday, neither parents nor children have much idea of what will happen – whether all under-16 users will find their accounts automatically deactivated, or whether there will be a new verification process.
“The policy is all concepts, but the technical guidance is still lacking,” said Ika Idris, a social media expert at Monash University, herself a mother of two children, aged 11 and 16, who use Roblox.
Calling the policy rushed, she said she was unsure what would happen on Saturday.
Earlier this month Meutya Hafid, Indonesia’s communications and digital minister, said the deactivation of current accounts of under-16s would take place gradually from Saturday.
She did not go into detail and the timeline, as well as the criteria for deactivation, remain unclear.
Officials at the ministry did not respond to requests for comment on details of the deactivation.
High-risk platforms must adjust their minimum age and deactivate accounts of underage users, as well as independently determine the risks they pose, according to a ministerial decree published this week.
Platforms are determined high risk if they fulfil criteria such as the possibility of talking to strangers, addictive qualities, and psychological risks, the ministry said.
