Closing Address by Minister Josephine Teo at the MDDI-IPS Forum on Fostering Child-Safe Digital Environments on Social Media

1.    I am pleased to see many of our partners whom we have been regularly engaging with here today.

2.    I'm especially happy to see many friends who are younger, and also students in school uniforms, in the room today.

3.    I also want to give a shout out to our international partners. They are our colleagues from eSafety Commissioner of Australia, and Netsafe New Zealand.

4.    I want to thank Brent for advising us to take our time. It is not often that policymakers anywhere in the world are told to take our time. It is more often a question: “Taking your time? Shouldn't you move a little bit faster?”

5.    As part of the closing, I wanted to jump straight to the key takeaways I had while listening to the conversation, and also share some feedback from my colleagues who were on the earlier panel. I thought it was useful to take a step back and ask ourselves what this forum is about, why it matters, and why we should pay attention to this topic.

6.    Very often, when I engage with my international colleagues, they are very interested in how Singapore thinks about digital development. In particular, they want to know our approach to digital governance.

7.    In fact, the way I describe our approach is that there are a few key strategies. One is around building up digital infrastructure. If you want to advance digital development, it is not possible to do so without proper internet access. You must ensure that the broad swath of your population has access to capable devices.

8.    Beyond infrastructure, there is the equally important question about capabilities, in the workforce and enterprises. Of course, when you think about digital governance, it is not possible to avoid questions about laws, regulations, and building new institutions.

9.    My colleague from IMDA had already described the kinds of things we have been willing to put in place. I would add that there has been a very distinct pivot in emphasis, especially in the last three to five years. In the earlier years, a lot of our emphasis with regard to laws and regulations was on the technical and structural aspects.

10.  For example, the Computer Misuse Act was enacted years ago. In the early 2010s, we had the Personal Data Protection Act and around 2015, we set up the Cyber Security Agency and put the Cyber Security Act in place.

11.  In the earliest years of pursuing digital development, the laws, regulations, and institutions we built dealt very much with these technical and structural foundations.

12.  The emphasis on harms to society and individuals is a relatively more recent phenomenon. Partly because these harms took time to surface, they remained largely in the background. People started paying attention to them, but they became more prominent in recent times and demanded responses from all of us in society.

13.  While sharing with my international counterparts what we are doing in terms of laws, regulations, and setting up new institutions, there is one thing that I have always emphasised: the digital domain is a very broad one.

14.  It touches people in ways that a policymaker is wise to recognise. He will never be able to do enough. There will always be the far corners of society where a policymaker is not even aware of specific problems that need to be addressed, or the specific gaps that need to be filled.

15.  Brent, the point you made earlier, that we really need to take a whole-of-society approach, is exactly right. We have felt for quite a few years now that depending on our own efforts alone is not going to cut it.

16.  There will always be gaps we cannot address on our own. We really need to bring together many different perspectives, organise them in a coherent way, and rally the whole-of-society to address them together.

17.  Later this afternoon, I will be seeing James again for the Digital for Life appreciation event. This is where we thank our partners for working with the government to ensure that the benefits of digital development are shared widely, and that we take care to plug the gaps as we observe them. Not only from the policymaker’s standpoint, but from what everyone else is observing together. That is the backdrop to why we are having this conversation.

18.  Specific to what we hope to do on social media and online safety: some time ago, in April or May, I wrote an op-ed that was published in the Straits Times, outlining how the government was thinking about this topic. The central idea was that social media is a reality of a young person's life today.

19.  Many panelists have already described how, for a child born into this world, there is no separation between the online world and the offline world. It is the same world to them. It can therefore be a little artificial to think about separating the two, in hope they can be managed differently. But that raises the question: what do we do to help children navigate the online world, and in particular their activities on social media?

20.  One thing rings loud and clear: the idea that we can keep them off completely is not realistic. And as James rightly pointed out, while the protection mindset is a natural one for parents, we cannot forget that there is also a preparedness mindset we must have.

21.  This means that if we want our children to thrive in any environment, protecting them from harm is only a part of it. Preparing them to deal with the realities of that environment is equally, if not more, important, in the long run.

22.  From that perspective, we proposed the idea of tiered access. Another way of putting that across is the idea of age-based access. This means that below a certain age, no access is probably the best approach.

23.  However, once a child gains some maturity and awareness of his environment, keeping them off is not going to be fully helpful over time. We have to find ways of creating a safe environment for them to start navigating and experiencing it for themselves. We must also build their skills to cope with the less savoury aspects of that environment and develop the ability to use it in ways that best benefit them.

24.  I want to just add that we do not believe that the answers should come only from policymakers. That is why we have been engaging widely and consulting the community on what they see as necessary in creating a child-safe environment in social media. That is also why we thought a forum like this would be useful, because it brings different perspectives to bear.

25.  With that as a background, let me go straight into the key takeaways I observed today. I would say that the support for some form of tiered, or age-based access is strong.

26.  I have seen this mentioned several times, but it is accompanied by an equally strong emphasis that those who have the most ability to influence the design of these platforms and services, have a responsibility to do right by their users. This means taking direct responsibility for the design features that ultimately impact users. So, we have strong support for tiered access, but also strong support for design responsibility, and quite clearly, design responsibility divides into two aspects.

27.  One is the people who make the service available. It is the same kind of expectation we have of a building developer. If I were to come into this building, I would expect that somebody would had made sure it was built safely, whether for fire safety or building safety. The same applies to any number of things that we use on a regular basis. The developers of these services and platforms have a design responsibility.

28.  The second is that regulations can impose the right kinds of obligations so that safety is achieved, not only because the developments of the product or service altruistically wish to do it, but also because society says this is what we expect of it. This is my first takeaway today.

29.  My second takeaway is that safety really goes beyond content. Safety is not just what you get to see or hear on these platforms. It is also a question of how often you are persuaded to stay on the platform. Safety has to do with the kinds of interactions that the platform enables, and whether these reflect the kinds of protections a child should have in the physical world, such as to protect them from interactions with strangers.

30.  Safety also includes features that a user will encounter on the platform, including features that are harmful, or features that encourage constant use, like scrolling as well as auto-playing. If we really want to create a child-safe environment, we cannot stop at content. We must also consider the features and designs of these services.

31.  My third takeaway is that there is strong support for government intervention when it is needed. It is one thing to bring whole-of-society efforts together, to rally everyone to do their part, but ultimately we need to think about the right forms of government interventions, whether child safety meet certain standards, and if those standards are not met, whether society supports the government in restricting access to those under 18.

32.  I should also add that while we are not averse to that outcome, we do not think that it is possible for us to block access to youths under 18. That is not the starting point. That is not the preferred outcome. We would much rather work collaboratively with platforms and service providers to try and create a service that our society finds acceptable. It is more of a collaborative approach, but at the same time, a determined approach, to ensure that if a service provider is not willing or able to make it sufficiently child safe, then it is better to block access to it.

33.  The result may therefore be a differentiated landscape, where some services and platforms will make child-safe access possible, and continue to provide access to those under 18. But there may be some services who are either unwilling or unable to do so. Then, as a society, we think that it is probably better to block access to these kinds of services for those under 18. From what I am hearing today, this is the kind of landscape that we want to see.

34.  Those are my three takeaways. I want to thank all participants today for making your positions loud and clear.

35.  To close, I want to return to a point that was repeatedly mentioned, which is that this desire for child-safe online environments is not something any single entity can achieve alone, and certainly not just through laws, regulations, and institutions. It is a whole-of-society effort, and we all have to be able to come together for that.

36.  One particular group has repeatedly told us how difficult this challenge is for them, and that is parents. I have great empathy for parents today. In a not-so-distant past, parents could be relied upon to know far more than their children. When our children were growing up, we could confidently say, "Do this, don't do that”, because we could be reasonably sure of the outcomes our children are likely to experience.

37.  However, in today's context, that is harder. The current environment that children are born into is harder to navigate. I was particularly struck by the slide James showed earlier, on how parents viewed social media in terms of time spent scrolling, compared to how children viewed social media as perhaps a place of joy, creativity, and friendship, but also of social pressure and peer acceptance. That was an instructive reminder not to assume it is easy for parents to guide their children to be successful in this space.

38.  I think in today's context, parents no longer have the luxury of certainty. So, I think that we need to journey along with each other, help each other, support each other, learn new tools about what parenting demands. We need to learn more about what our children are experiencing, while also acquiring new skills to help them to foster healthy digital habits. That is why we started with the Screen Smart from the Start movement.

39.  This is only the beginning. I see us having much more to do together. I am very grateful to my colleagues, MOS Rahayu, MOS Pei Ming and MOS Jasmin Lau, who will join this fight with you. One thing I have learned in this portfolio is that the landscape changes quickly. There is no ready playbook, no formula, no roadmap that we can simply borrow. Our greatest strength is that we have many like-minded individuals, and many passionate members of the community, who are willing to share what they are seeing.

40.  I'm particularly encouraged by the younger members of our community, as represented by Ben from YouthTechSG, and the students here today. I am struck by how wise they are in understanding the digital domain. They are teaching us so much about what we need to be able to do.

41.  One thing I shared with Ben earlier is a concern we have when dealing with social media platforms — how youths feel about the measures that may need to be taken. I was very encouraged when he said that youths themselves are resisting toxicity. That youths themselves will exercise their freedom of choice, whether or not the government has these regulations or requirements in place. They are saying that if a platform isn't going to take care of my safety, if a platform isn't willing to look after my well-being, then I will sign out and change the platform.

42.  This sense of agency, coming so loudly and clearly from our young people, is truly inspiring. It is something we can work with, a real energy that we need to harness as we move forward together.

43.  Once again, I want to thank IPS and our partners, and a special shout-out to my colleagues in the MDDI and IMDA family. They've been working really hard on online safety. With that, a round of applause for everyone. Thank you.