CYBER SAFETY: Rethinking online child protection — Minister Malatsi pushes for digital literacy rather than age bans

The online threats facing children online are rapidly evolving, especially in the age of artificial intelligence tools, systems and algorithms. To learn how children can be protected in this ever-changing online environment, Daily Maverick sat down with the minister of communications and digital technologies, Solly Malatsi, to discuss South Africa’s policy frameworks and to find out where some of the implementation gaps might lie. Part of the conversation revolved around the recent developments in countries including Australia and the United Kingdom, where “age bans” for children on social media have been imposed. The bans aim to prevent under-16s from accessing applications like Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, backed up by stronger requirements for age checks on platforms.The minister of communications and digital technologies, Solly Malatsi. (Photo: Luba Lesolle / Gallo Images) Malatsi cautioned against viewing such age bans as a “panacea to the problem that we are facing.“While it may be noble, I think we should also avoid the risk of pretending to do something without actually doing anything that will be enforceable. Because even in the example ... of Australia ... it’s still being bypassed through misrepresentation. So, there are already gaps that exist around the effectiveness of age restrictions on platforms,” he said.“I don’t think that is something that South Africa should be pursuing at all.”However, he added, there were options for improving children’s digital safety online that could work in a “very balanced way”, combining greater “honesty” in terms of mandatory age verification that was device- or platform-linked, with a more holistic approach to digital literacy awareness among caregivers and schools.Malatsi also stressed the importance of stronger partnerships with the companies behind social media platforms.“Platforms can’t just be content with the level of traffic on their platforms when that traffic may be leading to harm for the most vulnerable population on Earth, which is children,” he said.When asked how the Department of Communications and Digital Technologies was working with tech companies to improve the safeguarding of children online, he said it was a “continuous engagement”, but that the department was going to be “relentless” in ensuring that it provided protection to vulnerable people online. “Obviously, we are looking at the developments in various dispensations, mindful that South Africa is a unique dispensation … grounded in strong constitutional foundations that are not so strong in other dispensations. For a long time in South Africa, government pursued bold aspirations that it did not have capacity to execute and enforce, so it’s important that whatever we pursue, we can enforce,” said Malatsi.SA’s existing policy frameworks for online safetyThere is no one policy framework in South Africa that deals with all aspects of children’s digital safety, but rather a web of different pieces of legislation that collectively seek to protect children from online harms. This includes:The Cybercrimes Act, which makes it an offence to disclose intimate images without consent, and strictly penalises the manufacturing, distribution or possession of child sexual abuse material, among other crimes;The Protection of Personal Information Act (Popia), which treats children as a special category of the population requiring stricter safeguards, prohibiting the processing of a child’s personal information by apps, websites or social media platforms unless a “competent person” (a parent or legal guardian) gives consent; andThe Film and Publications Amendment Act, which enables the Film and Publication Board to issue take-down notices for harmful content, hate speech or explicit material involving children, and mandates that commercial online distributors adhere to age-rating and classification laws to protect children from seeing mature, violent or sexually explicit digital media.The Film and Publication Board also has a hotline for reporting online child exploitation (0800 148 148).Malatsi acknowledged that the risks facing children at a time of new and evolving technologies like AI deepfakes were “massive”.“You could argue the point that the current legislative framework has its own weaknesses in there, but also the element of law enforcement is not as robust, as prompt and as harsh as it ought to be,” he said.According to Malatsi, in the 2025/26 financial year, the Film and Publication Board analysed more than one million pieces of content, of which 9,250 were confirmed to be child sexual abuse material. However, this resulted in only 16 criminal cases, of which nine were in Gauteng and six in the Western Cape. He added that the board issued 316 take-down notices during that year, with about 97 emerging from public complaints. “Obviously, some of the [criminal] cases, particularly the most prominent cases … evolve or get finalised over a multi-year period,” said Malatsi.“We’re starting to see glimpses of those … appropriate lengthy sentences, with perpetrators ultimately being recorded in the National Register for Sex Offenders, but it’s not happening consistently and at the scale at which the level of exposure exists.”Age verification and misrepresentationMalatsi noted that a greater capacitation of law enforcement for cybercrimes needed to be paired with increased responsibility on the part of the platforms themselves, particularly around age verification and the labelling of AI-generated content.He argued that every player in the ecosystem needed to come to the party to strengthen child protections online.This included parents and caregivers. When discussing the limitations of Popia’s ability to prevent the processing of children’s data without consent, Malatsi acknowledged that there were instances in which the ages of children were misrepresented online.“More than just looking at it from a prescriptive legislation perspective, the people who buy devices are parents, and obviously there’s an aspect of parental supervision that is necessary,” he said. “You can’t regulate every sort of behaviour, and that should never be the aspiration. The aspiration should be a balanced approach that minimises nefarious activity, and to have the law enforcement [with] means to act promptly where such instances of nefarious intents are then spreading.”Earlier this year, the Department of Communications and Digital Technologies published the Draft South Africa National Artificial Intelligence Policy for public comment, only to withdraw it after it was found that generative AI had been used in its development, resulting in fabricated references.Asked whether the updated policy, which has yet to be reissued, would centre matters of child protection, Malatsi said, “I think the reality of the time that we’re in is that no policymaker can ignore that there is an escalation of exposure to online harms, so it then becomes inherent that any policymaking process would also seek to ensure that it prioritises the need to safeguard … the digital dignity of everyone, from children to adults. “Any policy that doesn’t do that would miss a massive opportunity to deal with one of the most prevalent challenges of our time when it comes to online interfacing.”Risks to children onlineEmma Sadleir, a leading digital law expert, described herself as a “first responder” for children who encounter harms or exploitation online. She has often found that the “threat of the law” is sufficient to help children in times of crisis.She noted that the legal frameworks in South Africa offer many protections, but that challenges emerged at the level of the police agency’s ability to enforce the law.Some of the most common crimes she sees against children include:Sextortion, generally driven by international criminal syndicates targeting children of all ages;AI-generated sexual or offensive imagery;Cyberbullying; andCreation and distribution of child sexual abuse material.“I’d say in a lot of communities, a huge issue is kids being exposed far too young, so getting phones way too young… It’s almost like a status thing in some communities, where you see kids in … Grade 1 having smartphones and having TikTok accounts before they can even read,” she said.“I would like to bring in legislation around social media age-gating ... and then making schools phone-free; so, those two legislative interventions I would like, but I don’t think that the answer is to create new legislation for every new issue that we see.”The effectiveness of age-gating social media continues to be a matter of debate among child protection experts. Anzio Jacobs, child safety and protection programme lead at the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund, pointed out that implementing this type of policy on the African continent would be challenging as many children are not accessing digital platforms from their own devices, but those of adults. “The second thing that we’re noticing through data is that when you have a regulation that says children may not use social media, children often become more proactive and rigorous in finding ways around those regulations, so you can see it in the countries where it’s already been implemented,” he said.Centring children’s voicesJacobs emphasised the importance of including children’s voices in shaping the strategies to improve online safety, using the example of the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund’s Digital Justice Summit in 2025, which brought together 50 children to unpack the these issues. “What the children are saying is that when they go online, for example, when it comes to the [terms and conditions], nobody reads that, including their parents, including them, and then they use these platforms without any sense of what risk will be included in their use of the platform... The second [issue] is that they’re saying they would like to be monitored more by their parents,” said Jacobs.Practitioners in the children’s sector, he continued, were concerned that existing policy frameworks did not have enough focus on child users of digital spaces, nor enough safeguards against large, foreign tech companies deploying digital platforms in South Africa.“I don’t think there is a lack of frameworks; they exist. It’s about the incorporation of children and meaningful language for the protection of children that we are not seeing in these frameworks,” he said.Christina Nomdo, director of the Child Centred Governance Academy. (Photo: Supplied) Balancing rightsChristina Nomdo, director of the Child Centred Governance Academy, echoed Jacobs’ sentiments about including children in discourse about online safety. She argued that children, like adults, needed to have a balance of rights, covering their entitlement to provisioning, protection and participation.“You can’t say we need to go overboard on the protection rights, and then you’re undermining children’s participation rights,” she said.In her work, Nomdo aims to educate children on practical ways to protect themselves online, including limiting the information they share and verifying the identities of the people with whom they interact. “Adults have to take a lot of responsibility for how they conduct themselves, even online, when there are children also in the group. There’s role-modelling that takes place,” she said.Reflecting on some countries’ efforts to prevent children from accessing devices and online platforms, Nomdo said that a total ban was actually adults abdicating their responsibility to hold tech companies accountable for their lack of self-regulation.“What we really need to do is, firstly, to regulate the corporates. Secondly, as adults who are the first guardians of children’s rights in their lived realities, we need to start building the children’s skills for decision-making and discernment. We need to give them belonging in the real world, so that they don’t seek belonging in the online world,” she said. DM