Encourage The Age Limit For Social Media Users, Kemkomdigi Forms A Godok Team For Realization Of Rules

A boy uses his cellphone to document his activities. (Kelly Sikkema-Unsplash)

JAKARTA - The Ministry of Communication and Digital Affairs (Kemkomdigi) plans to limit access to social media users by age.

Minister of Communication and Digital Affairs (Menkomdigi) Meutya Hafid revealed that his party has also signed a Decree (SK) to form a special working team that will discuss studies on these restrictions, including other regulations related to child protection in the digital space.

"According to the President's directives and enthusiasm to strengthen child protection in the digital space, we are following up with the formation of a Working Team Decree for child protection regulations on the internet, including the possibility of including limiting social media access to a certain age," he said in Jakarta, Sunday, February 2, as reported by Antara.

Based on the decree, the Minister of Trade revealed that the working team consisting of representatives of several ministries, academics, child education leaders, child observer institutions Save The Children Indonesia, Psychologists, Child Protection Institutions represented by Kak Seto, and many other related institutions will work starting Monday, February 3.

"The president told us that we want an acceleration of the rules for child protection in this digital space so that it can be resolved as soon as possible and we are given one to two months," said Meutya.

The Minister of Trade said this effort was to deal with the rampant consumption of pornography by children on the internet, where Indonesia is currently ranked fourth in the world in the realm of access to the largest pornographic content.

"This has not mentioned online gambling (judol) which also targets children, bullying, sexual violence against children, and also other negative aspects," he added.

Based on data from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) 2024, content on Indonesian child pornography cases over the past four years has reached more than 5 million cases.

Reflecting on the survey by the Indonesian Internet Service Providers Association (APJII) in 2023, it is known that the internet penetration rate in Indonesia reached 79.5 percent of Indonesia's total population of 279.3 million people based on data from the Central Statistics Agency (BPS).

Internet penetration is quite large contributed by Generation Z groups or those born between 1997 and 2012, which amounted to 87.02 percent.

The fairly high number was also contributed by the post-Z generation or those born after 2013, namely with penetration of 48.10 percent.

They generally spend 97 percent of their time surfing online using devices such as smartphones. Unfortunately, not a few of them stopped at online gambling sites.