Vietnam has settled on a notably different approach than many of the countries currently racing to restrict children’s access to social media. Rather than banning under-16s from platforms entirely, as Australia did in December 2025 and France has moved toward for under-15s, Vietnam’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism has finalized draft rules that keep young users logged in, just with their ability to actively participate significantly curtailed and their accounts placed under direct parental supervision.
Under the finalized draft amendments to Decree 147, which governs internet-based services in Vietnam, children under 16 would no longer be able to open social media accounts independently. A parent or guardian would instead need to register the account using their own phone number and identity details, verify it, and take on formal responsibility for supervising both the content the child sees and how much time they spend on the platform. For children specifically under 13, the restrictions go further still, blocking their ability to post, comment, or share content altogether, limiting their accounts to viewing only. Deputy Culture Minister Phan Tam described the underlying philosophy behind the approach clearly, stating that the goal isn’t to ban or excessively restrict children’s access to social media, but to ensure they’re placed in an age-appropriate environment when they do use these platforms.
The mechanics behind this “look, don’t touch” style framework place substantial new obligations directly on social media companies operating in Vietnam, both domestic and foreign. Platforms would be required to set the highest privacy protection settings by default for any account identified as belonging to a child, distribute only age-appropriate content, and actively detect and block material involving violence, pornography, gambling, drugs, suicide, and other dangerous activities. Larger cross-border platforms specifically, defined under the draft as those drawing at least one million monthly users, face additional requirements, including giving parents dedicated tools to monitor their child’s content exposure, friend lists, and screen time for users aged 13 to under 16, alongside the outright locking of posting, commenting, and sharing features for anyone under 13.
Vietnam isn’t stopping at social media either. A parallel set of restrictions targeting online gaming would require game operators to verify user ages and register under-16 accounts through a parent or guardian in much the same way as the social media rules, while capping daily play time at 60 minutes per game for any single company’s titles. That gaming provision effectively extends the same parental registration and oversight model across two of the most heavily used categories of online activity among Vietnamese youth simultaneously, rather than treating social media and gaming as separate regulatory problems requiring entirely different solutions.
The draft rules also reach beyond child safety specifically into broader platform accountability measures. Owners of accounts, channels, or community pages with at least one million followers or members would be required to report their contact details directly to the ministry, while content managers at online news websites and social networks would need to hold Vietnamese nationality and complete government-run training within 12 months of receiving their operating license. Those provisions signal that Vietnam’s broader internet governance ambitions extend well past protecting minors, touching on how the government tracks and holds accountable the operators of large, influential online communities more generally.
Major platforms operating in Vietnam have pushed back on specific elements of the proposal, particularly the restriction preventing under-16 users from posting, commenting, or sharing content at all. Nguyen Lam Thanh, head of TikTok Vietnam, argued that a blanket ban on interaction should be reconsidered, suggesting regulators instead focus on strengthening guardian oversight through technical measures rather than outright prohibition on specific platform functions. Meta’s public policy director for Vietnam, Nguyen Thu Thao, raised a more technical concern, explaining that Meta currently identifies likely child accounts by reading behavioral patterns and activity signals combined with AI-based age estimation. If children are restricted to purely passive viewing without commenting, liking, or sharing, Thao warned, platforms lose exactly the behavioral signals they currently rely on to detect that an account belongs to a minor in the first place, potentially undermining the very child-protection systems these companies have already built.
That objection points to a genuine tension running through Vietnam’s proposed framework. The rule is explicitly designed to limit how actively children can engage with social platforms, yet the platforms’ existing detection systems for identifying child users often depend on observing exactly that kind of active engagement. Whether Vietnam’s final regulations account for that tension, perhaps through the mandatory parental registration process substituting for behavioral detection entirely, remains to be seen as the rules move toward implementation.
Vietnam’s approach fits within a rapidly expanding global pattern of governments introducing age-based restrictions on youth social media use, though its specific middle-ground design, full account access paired with restricted interaction rather than an outright age-based ban, stands out as one of the more inventive regulatory responses proposed so far. With roughly 85.6 million internet users representing over 84 percent of Vietnam’s population as of the end of 2025, the practical scale of implementing and enforcing parental registration and content restrictions across that user base represents a genuinely significant undertaking, one that major platforms including Meta and TikTok will need to build substantial new verification and monitoring infrastructure to support if the rules move forward as currently drafted.
Further detail on the proposed regulations is available through Vietnam’s Authority of Broadcasting and Electronic Information. For more coverage of global technology regulation and child safety policy, visit Tech Chora.
Meta Description: Vietnam will not ban social media for under-16s, instead requiring parental registration and account oversight under new draft internet rules.
Focus Keyword: Vietnam social media under-16 rules
Related 6 Keywords: Vietnam has settled on a notably different approach than many of the countries currently racing to restrict children’s access to social media. Rather than banning under-16s from platforms entirely, as Australia did in December 2025 and France has moved toward for under-15s, Vietnam’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism has finalized draft rules that keep young users logged in, just with their ability to actively participate significantly curtailed and their accounts placed under direct parental supervision.
Under the finalized draft amendments to Decree 147, which governs internet-based services in Vietnam, children under 16 would no longer be able to open social media accounts independently. A parent or guardian would instead need to register the account using their own phone number and identity details, verify it, and take on formal responsibility for supervising both the content the child sees and how much time they spend on the platform. For children specifically under 13, the restrictions go further still, blocking their ability to post, comment, or share content altogether, limiting their accounts to viewing only. Deputy Culture Minister Phan Tam described the underlying philosophy behind the approach clearly, stating that the goal isn’t to ban or excessively restrict children’s access to social media, but to ensure they’re placed in an age-appropriate environment when they do use these platforms.
The mechanics behind this “look, don’t touch” style framework place substantial new obligations directly on social media companies operating in Vietnam, both domestic and foreign. Platforms would be required to set the highest privacy protection settings by default for any account identified as belonging to a child, distribute only age-appropriate content, and actively detect and block material involving violence, pornography, gambling, drugs, suicide, and other dangerous activities. Larger cross-border platforms specifically, defined under the draft as those drawing at least one million monthly users, face additional requirements, including giving parents dedicated tools to monitor their child’s content exposure, friend lists, and screen time for users aged 13 to under 16, alongside the outright locking of posting, commenting, and sharing features for anyone under 13.
Vietnam isn’t stopping at social media either. A parallel set of restrictions targeting online gaming would require game operators to verify user ages and register under-16 accounts through a parent or guardian in much the same way as the social media rules, while capping daily play time at 60 minutes per game for any single company’s titles. That gaming provision effectively extends the same parental registration and oversight model across two of the most heavily used categories of online activity among Vietnamese youth simultaneously, rather than treating social media and gaming as separate regulatory problems requiring entirely different solutions.
The draft rules also reach beyond child safety specifically into broader platform accountability measures. Owners of accounts, channels, or community pages with at least one million followers or members would be required to report their contact details directly to the ministry, while content managers at online news websites and social networks would need to hold Vietnamese nationality and complete government-run training within 12 months of receiving their operating license. Those provisions signal that Vietnam’s broader internet governance ambitions extend well past protecting minors, touching on how the government tracks and holds accountable the operators of large, influential online communities more generally.
Major platforms operating in Vietnam have pushed back on specific elements of the proposal, particularly the restriction preventing under-16 users from posting, commenting, or sharing content at all. Nguyen Lam Thanh, head of TikTok Vietnam, argued that a blanket ban on interaction should be reconsidered, suggesting regulators instead focus on strengthening guardian oversight through technical measures rather than outright prohibition on specific platform functions. Meta’s public policy director for Vietnam, Nguyen Thu Thao, raised a more technical concern, explaining that Meta currently identifies likely child accounts by reading behavioral patterns and activity signals combined with AI-based age estimation. If children are restricted to purely passive viewing without commenting, liking, or sharing, Thao warned, platforms lose exactly the behavioral signals they currently rely on to detect that an account belongs to a minor in the first place, potentially undermining the very child-protection systems these companies have already built.
That objection points to a genuine tension running through Vietnam’s proposed framework. The rule is explicitly designed to limit how actively children can engage with social platforms, yet the platforms’ existing detection systems for identifying child users often depend on observing exactly that kind of active engagement. Whether Vietnam’s final regulations account for that tension, perhaps through the mandatory parental registration process substituting for behavioral detection entirely, remains to be seen as the rules move toward implementation.
Vietnam’s approach fits within a rapidly expanding global pattern of governments introducing age-based restrictions on youth social media use, though its specific middle-ground design, full account access paired with restricted interaction rather than an outright age-based ban, stands out as one of the more inventive regulatory responses proposed so far. With roughly 85.6 million internet users representing over 84 percent of Vietnam’s population as of the end of 2025, the practical scale of implementing and enforcing parental registration and content restrictions across that user base represents a genuinely significant undertaking, one that major platforms including Meta and TikTok will need to build substantial new verification and monitoring infrastructure to support if the rules move forward as currently drafted.
Further detail on the proposed regulations is available through Vietnam’s Authority of Broadcasting and Electronic Information. For more coverage of global technology regulation and child safety policy, visit Business Tech.
