Which Countries Restrict Social Media for Kids? Vietnam Joins the List

Vietnam is preparing to restrict social media access for children, according to a report from TechCrunch, joining a rapidly expanding roster of countries moving to shield young users from platforms including TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. The proposal, still in its early stages, would add Vietnam's roughly 100 million residents to a global experiment testing how governments can regulate children's exposure to social media.

The move follows a template set by Australia, which in late 2025 became the first country to implement a nationwide ban on social media accounts for children under 16. That law required platforms to take "reasonable steps" to verify users' ages and remove or block accounts belonging to minors, placing the compliance burden squarely on the companies rather than on parents or schools.

Vietnam's proposal, though not yet finalized, points to the same underlying concerns that drove Australia's law: cyberbullying, social media addiction, and the risk of predatory contact with minors. These three concerns have become the standard justification cited by lawmakers worldwide as they draft similar restrictions, appearing almost verbatim in legislative debates from Canberra to Paris.

Momentum has been building steadily since Australia's ban took effect. Several European Union member states have floated or introduced age-verification requirements, while the bloc's executive arm has weighed EU-wide minimum age rules for social media use, a step that would harmonize a patchwork of national approaches. France briefly attempted its own age-verification law in 2024 before it stalled over technical and constitutional hurdles, illustrating how difficult enforcement can be even for determined regulators. Lawmakers in Germany and Italy have also floated similar proposals, though neither has advanced past early committee discussion.

In the United States, the picture remains fragmented. Utah, Arkansas, and several other states have passed or attempted to pass laws requiring parental consent or age verification for minors on social media, only for many to be blocked or narrowed by courts on First Amendment grounds. Federal legislation, including versions of the Kids Online Safety Act, has circulated in Congress for years without passing into law, leaving the U.S. without a national standard.

Elsewhere in Asia, Indonesia and Malaysia have both signaled interest in following Australia's approach, and Vietnam's proposal now adds a third Southeast Asian voice to that conversation. China, notably, already imposes strict limits on minors' screen time and social media use through its own regulatory system, though its approach predates and differs in mechanism from the wave of Western-style age bans now spreading elsewhere.

The core enforcement challenge every one of these countries faces is age verification itself. Platforms have experimented with facial-age-estimation software, government ID checks, and parental-consent portals, but each method carries trade-offs: ID checks raise privacy concerns, facial estimation has margins of error, and self-reported birthdates are trivially easy for children to falsify. Critics of the bans argue that determined teenagers will simply use VPNs, borrowed accounts, or third-party apps to route around restrictions, as has already been documented in Australia in the months following its ban. Some regulators are now weighing additional device-level verification requirements to close those gaps, though such measures raise their own privacy trade-offs.

Child-safety advocates counter that even imperfect enforcement reduces exposure at the margins, pointing to internal industry research and academic studies linking heavy adolescent social media use to anxiety, depression, and disrupted sleep. Platforms themselves have pushed back on the characterization of their products as inherently harmful, while simultaneously rolling out their own teen-safety features, including default private accounts, screen-time reminders, and restricted direct messaging for minors.

For Vietnam specifically, the proposal arrives at a moment when the country's social media user base is among the largest in Southeast Asia relative to population. Any Vietnamese restriction would likely need to address platforms with major local followings, including TikTok, Facebook, and Zalo, the domestically popular messaging app, though details on which services would be covered have not yet been published.

As more governments weigh similar measures, the list of countries restricting minors' social media access is likely to keep growing rather than stabilizing. Vietnam's proposal, still subject to revision and formal adoption, represents the latest data point in what has become a defining regulatory trend of the mid-2020s: the question is no longer whether governments will act on children's social media use, but how, and how effectively they can enforce it.