Keeping Japanese Children Safe in Cyberspace: Weighing the Roles of Government, Business, and Family

Social media provides a valuable space for interaction that cuts across age groups and national borders, allowing people of different backgrounds to share their knowledge and culture. In recent years, however, the hazards of social media have raised deep concerns worldwide. Flaming, shaming, cyberbullying, fraud, and fake news have become rampant on the Internet, with troubling incidents reported on a near-daily basis.

A key factor behind these escalating problems is the platforms’ evolving functionalities, developed with the aim of prolonging user engagement and generating advertising revenue. Prominent among these is the practice of tracking viewing history and recommending buzzworthy content on the basis of how likely a user is to engage with it. Responding to this trend, a growing number of social media accounts deliberately post sensational and inflammatory content simply to attract as many views as possible. Even mature adults are vulnerable to this barrage of toxic information. What happens when emotionally developing children are exposed to it?

Global Moves Toward Regulation

In December 2024, Australia enacted a law requiring social media companies to restrict the use of their platforms to persons aged 16 or older. Companies that do not comply within 12 months of the law’s enactment face fines of up to A$50 million. The statute applies to such widely used platforms as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and X (formerly Twitter), although YouTube is exempt. Children and parents will not be subject to penalties.

Reactions to Australia’s tough new law have been mixed. Although supported by a majority of Australian parents, it has provoked a backlash from tech giants. UNICEF has warned that it could drive children into dark, unregulated corners of the Internet. Many experts have questioned whether such a ban can be enforced.

Children and Social Media in Japan

Before considering what measures Japan should take to protect children online, let us take a look at recent trends in social-media engagement among Japanese minors. According to a 2023 survey of electronic information and communications usage conducted by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, the top platforms among Japanese between the ages of 10 and 19, in order of usage rate, are Line (95.0%), YouTube (94.3%), Instagram (72.9%), TikTok (70.0%), and X (65.7%). Let us take a closer look at these platforms and how they are used.

Line is widely used as a tool for communication (messaging and voice calls) among family and friends. Activity on YouTube focuses on the channels of popular influencers, whose fans and followers check in daily to view the latest videos and share their reactions.

Instagram, a service centered on photo and video sharing, has emerged as a staple among teens and young adults. This platform allows individuals to open multiple accounts, including sub-accounts on which sharing can be restricted to a designated circle of friends or followers. Most young users take advantage of the platform’s Stories function, which automatically removes posts after 24 hours, thus encouraging people to post frequently and casually. Instagram also offers a live-broadcast feature that allows account holders to stream videos in real time and can be used for video calls among small groups of friends.

TikTok, a platform for creating and sharing videos, is popular among teenagers (less so among older age groups). Although best known for its entertaining song and dance videos, it also broadcasts news clips and other informational content. TikTok accounts are ostensibly limited to users aged 13 and over, but word has it that many grade school students enjoy access. X is regarded mainly as a news source in Japan.

According to the aforementioned government survey, Japanese young people aged 10 to 19 spend an average of 56 minutes viewing or writing posts on social media on weekdays and 80 minutes on Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays. In the same age group, average daily use of video-sharing services (posting and watching) is 112 minutes during the week and 174 minutes on weekends and holidays. The use of video-sharing sites and apps is conspicuously high among young people in their teens and twenties. Excessive usage is a recurring theme among parents who come to me for advice, suggesting that smartphone addiction is a serious concern for many Japanese families.

Escalating Harms

Having surveyed social media use among Japanese teenagers, let us move on to the escalating problems associated with such engagement.

In June 2024, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications released the results of a survey on Internet usage by children and teenagers in Japan. According to the report, 46% of those surveyed had experienced difficulties as a result of their engagement with the Internet. The most frequent complaint among both junior high school girls and high school boys was “feeling stressed when comparing my posts with other people’s,” hinting at the impact social media can have on young people’s emotional well-being.

Interviews with survey subjects brought to light problems involving public disclosure or other misuse of intimate photos, secretly filmed videos, and screenshots of private chats. One young woman reported being sent lewd images after connecting with a number of men via a Line OpenChat room.

The unauthorized sharing and dissemination of photos and private messages is a form of cyberbullying, which has the potential to cause serious harm. In serious cases, victims of cyberbullying may stop attending school or even take their own lives. In November 2020, a sixth-grade girl in metropolitan Tokyo committed suicide after classmates subjected her to intense harassment using the chat function on school-issued tablets. In February 2022, a 15-year-old boy in Osaka Prefecture committed suicide as a result of cyberbullying via a Line chat room and anonymous posts on other social media platforms.

Crime rings have latched onto social media as a means of recruiting for so-called shady part-time work, which has been responsible for a wave of crimes over the past year. Lured by the promise of easy money, young applicants are manipulated or coerced into taking part in scams and burglaries. In October 2024, police in Yamaguchi Prefecture picked up three teenagers, including a junior high school student, on suspicion of preparing to break into a house in the city of Hikari, some 1,000 kilometers from their homes in the Kantō region. According to their confessions, they were recruited individually through social media and met up for the first time on the day they were to commit the robbery, following messaged instructions from an anonymous taskmaster. In some cases, believing the job offer to be legitimate, young people provide personal information that the crime group then uses to threaten them when they try to back out.

Police also report a sharp rise in incidents of sexual harassment, predation, and exploitation. Young users have been persuaded to share intimate photos of themselves and then exposed or threatened with exposure. Pedophiles have used social media to groom youngsters, including a growing number of grade-school children, gaining their confidence and eventually securing compromising photos or arranging in-person meetings that can end in kidnapping and abuse.

How Useful Are Age Limits?

Instagram, X, and TikTok restrict usage to persons aged 13 or over in their terms of service, and Line has a “recommended age rating” of 12 and up, which means that children under that age require parental consent and are subject to parental controls.

However, many people complain that such restrictions are insufficient and poorly enforced. For example, Line uses the registrant’s mobile carrier to verify personal information, but this permits registration by young children using family cellphone accounts. And since many Japanese parents give their grade-school children access to cellphones and the Line app for family messaging purposes, younger and younger children are being exposed to the hazards of social media.

Growing awareness of the risks posed to youth by social media is expected to foster support for the imposition of legal age restrictions in Japan. In November 2024, for instance, the government’s Children and Families Agency launched a working group to consider policies aimed at protecting young people active online.

Anxious to avoid such regulation, social media platforms have been taking steps on their own. Instagram, for example, has instituted Teen Accounts for all users aged 13 through 17, introduced in Japan in January 2025. By default, all Teen Accounts are private, that is, accessible only to approved followers, and messaging is restricted as well. Teens under 16 need the permission of parents with account supervision status to change their safety settings. Parents with such status can also monitor their teens’ accounts more directly, but since the teens can remove that supervision, it is less effective than the parental controls one can install in most smartphones.

What Parents Can Do

Even with reliable age verification, blanket age restrictions will not necessarily solve the problems we have examined here and may even exacerbate them. As critics of the Australian ban have pointed out, children who are barred from the major platforms may find alternatives in dark corners of the Internet—spaces devoid of the safeguards instituted by the big tech firms and easily infiltrated by predators targeting the young. Minors may be less willing to seek help from responsible adults if they have been using the Internet in secret.

Other critics of blanket age restrictions point out that social media can provide important havens and outlets for children in toxic home environments. The more serious the family dysfunction, the harder it is to confide in friends or teachers. Online, one can seek advice anonymously. Do we really want to deprive children of those resources?

I believe our top priority should be educating young people and their parents about the safe and appropriate use of social media. Certainly there is a need for better regulation and improvement of platforms. In the meantime, however, the dangers posed to children are escalating as more and more gain access to smartphones and the Internet.

There are two things parents can do right now to protect their children: lay clear ground rules for the use of cellphones at home and make use of built-in parental controls. Adults must avoid treating their kids’ smartphones like black boxes.

Families need to foster transparency and open communication, so that children will feel free to turn to their parents as soon as they run into trouble with social media. At school, children should be instructed in Internet literacy and the appropriate use of the computer terminals (one device per student) issued to them under Japan’s GIGA School Program. Above all, we adults need to monitor our own behavior on the Internet and set a good example for children to follow.

(Originally published in Japanese. Banner photo: © Pixta.)