Vietnam's Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism has circulated a draft decree that would bar children under 16 from posting, commenting, or reacting to content on social media platforms, while allowing them to keep their accounts in a read-only mode. TechCrunch reported the proposal on July 24, 2026, attributing the initial disclosure to Reuters.

Under the draft, children under 16 would not be permitted to register social media accounts using their own information, according to Tuoi Tre. Accounts would instead need to be registered under a parent or guardian, who would be responsible for monitoring both the content accessed and the time spent on the platform. Platforms operating in Vietnam would be required to deploy technical measures to identify child users and restrict them to age-appropriate content. TechCrunch

Deputy Culture Minister Phan Tam framed the objective narrowly, stating the goal is to ensure children are in an age-appropriate environment on social media, not to ban or excessively restrict access. The decree has not been finalized and could undergo revision before adoption. TechCrunch

Vietnam is also considering separate gaming restrictions that mirror the social media proposal's parental registration requirement, paired with a 60-minute daily play cap for users under 16. TechCrunch

The move follows earlier Vietnamese regulatory attention to minors and online platforms. In October 2023, VNExpress reported that Vietnamese authorities had proposed banning children under 13 from using TikTok, along with suggested screen time restrictions. The current draft decree broadens that earlier focus from a single platform to social media generally, and raises the age threshold from 13 to 16.

Vietnam's proposal arrives in a regulatory landscape that shifted materially in late 2025, when Australia became the first country to implement a social media ban for children under 16, with the measure taking effect in December 2025. TechCrunch The Australian model and the Vietnamese draft share an age threshold but diverge in mechanism. Australia's approach prohibits access outright for under-16s, requiring platforms to take reasonable steps to prevent underage account creation. Vietnam's draft would preserve account access while removing interactive features, effectively turning social media into a broadcast-only experience for minors.

That distinction matters for platforms. A full access ban, as Australia has implemented, places the compliance burden on age verification at the gateway: the platform must prevent the account from being created in the first place. Vietnam's model would require platforms to maintain a more granular state: accounts that exist and can consume content but cannot produce it. This means the platform would need to check user identity on every logged-in session and enforce restrictions at the API level — the layer of the platform's code that handles actions like posting, commenting, and reacting — rather than simply blocking registration.

The parental registration requirement adds a second compliance dimension. Platforms would need to support a linkage model where a child account is created under and administratively owned by a parent account, with monitoring tools that surface content consumption and time-on-platform data to that parent. Some Western platforms already offer family-linking features, but mandating them by decree, with legal liability attached to the parent for monitoring, is a different posture from offering them as optional controls.

Vietnam's online population exceeds 78 million, and platforms like TikTok, Facebook, and Zalo command substantial daily engagement. The decree, if adopted in its current form, would require these platforms to build or extend country-specific compliance infrastructure for age classification, interaction restriction, and parental linkage, with the added complexity that the rules for gaming platforms would differ from those for social media despite sharing the parental registration requirement.

The draft's flexibility at this stage is worth noting. Deputy Minister Tam's emphasis on an age-appropriate environment rather than a ban, combined with the explicit acknowledgment that revisions are possible, suggests the final decree could land anywhere on a spectrum from the current interaction-blocking model to something closer to Australia's harder line. For platforms operating in Southeast Asia, the signal is that the regional regulatory direction is toward greater minor-protection mandates, with the remaining question being how restrictive the final instruments become.

In my view, the interaction-restriction model Vietnam is floating is more technically interesting than a blanket ban. A ban is a binary gate: verify age at the door and deny entry. Stripping interactive features while preserving access creates a graduated permissions architecture — a system where different users get different levels of what they can do on the same platform — that platforms have not broadly built at scale, because no major market has required it. If Vietnam adopts this approach and other jurisdictions follow, the engineering work involved would not be trivial, and it would set a precedent for granular, age-tiered platform behavior that goes beyond what any country has mandated to date.