Vietnam has settled on an unusual way to police children online. Under a draft decree unveiled this week, users under 16 would keep their social media accounts but lose the right to post, comment, or react to anything on them.
It is a narrower move than Australia’s outright ban, and a stranger one, because it leaves children in the room while taking away their voice. The blunter bans have not gone smoothly, running aground on the basic problem of checking ages.
The proposal comes from the country’s culture ministry, which absorbed oversight of media and broadcasting in last year’s government reshuffle, and was outlined on Thursday by Deputy Minister Phan Tam.
The text has not been finalised and could be revised before adoption, according to the draft reported by Reuters. No implementation date has been set.
Platforms would have to verify users’ ages and register accounts for under-16s using a parent or guardian’s details, an approach that leans hard on the kind of age-verification machinery other governments have found difficult to make work.
Parents would then be responsible for supervising what their children watch, and for how long.
Companies would also be required to proactively detect, issue warnings about, and block material involving violence, pornography, gambling, drugs, and suicide, and to apply the highest level of privacy protection to children’s accounts.
The framing is protective rather than prohibitive, at least on paper, and the ministry has cast the exercise as one of shaping the environment rather than shutting the door.
“The primary objective is not to ban or excessively restrict children’s access to social media, but rather to ensure that when children use social media services, they are placed in an age-appropriate environment,” Phan Tam said.
How a platform would tell a 15-year-old from a 16-year-old is left largely to the platform. The draft asks companies to use technical measures to identify child users without spelling out what those measures are, the same gap that has undermined similar rules elsewhere.
In Australia, testers opening accounts as fictional teenagers found that most major services never asked them to prove their age at all.
The timing places Vietnam inside a widening wave. Australia became the first country to bar under-16s from holding accounts when its ban took effect in December, and has since moved to sharpen enforcement after early studies found most teenagers still logging in.
France’s parliament approved a ban on access for under-15s on Tuesday, with the measure due to bite later. Britain, meanwhile, is weighing its own restrictions. Vietnam’s version is the outlier: it preserves access while governing speech.
What the draft does not settle, in the version made public, is how far it reaches. It does not name the platforms it covers, and Vietnam’s largest audiences sit on foreign services such as Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube, which would have to build the parent-linked registration and detection systems the rules assume.
Nor is it clear how a posting ban would be enforced once an account exists and a child is already inside it.
The same draft would tighten the rules on gaming. Operators would have to check players’ ages and cap under-16s at 60 minutes of play per day per company, a limit that gets easier to imagine circumventing the more companies a child signs up with.
None of this arrives in a vacuum. Vietnam has spent years tightening its grip on what happens online, from earlier decrees requiring platforms to verify user identities and strip out anonymous accounts to a cybersecurity law that took effect on July 1. Age gates sit comfortably inside that project.
For a state that already asks its citizens to attach their real names to their accounts, the logic is consistent enough.
The novelty is the line the decree draws, if it survives redrafting: an age at which a person may read the internet but not answer it.
