School shootings used to be rare in the Philippines. But a spate of incidents involving students this year seems to have catalyzed the Southeast Asian nation’s lawmakers to swiftly pass bills cracking down on what they deem to be a cause of the deadly trend: social media.
On Monday, the Philippines House of Representatives passed a bill banning children under 13 from social media platforms, while those between 13 and 17 would have limited access, with 287 members voting in favor and only three against the measure. The latest bill follows its Senate counterpart, which passed last week but has a higher age threshold, barring people under 18 from social media platforms and services classified as “high-risk.”
The bills must first reconcile their differences before they head to the President for signature. But their passage already follows steps taken by other countries such as Australia, the U.K., and more in introducing age-based restrictions on social media amid concerns over these platforms’ impact on children’s mental health and safety.
Philippine President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. said that it was not “surprising at all” that Congress took action amid concerns that social media is believed to have influenced children to take part in violent acts. However, Marcos said his Administration would still study whether such a ban could work in the Southeast Asian nation of more than 110 million people.
“That’s also something that we’re studying really hard,” Marcos told reporters in Singapore on Sunday. “It has its advantages,” he said, but he warned it could also “simply make children hide their use.”
Age-specific social media bans have been up for debate in the Philippines since at least 2019, but it gained momentum earlier this year, following reports of a foiled mass shooting plot by students in February as well as shootings and stabbings in other regions in the months that followed. Education Secretary Juan Edgardo Angara said harmful online influences were a possible factor behind those incidents, saying in July that experts have pointed to “exposure of young people to damaging social media sites, negative influences, groomers, and terrorist groups online actively recruiting (children).”
A ban, however, is an escalatory approach in one of the countries from which users spend the most time online. Critics have also questioned whether such bans are effective. Australia was the first country to ban social media for children, but a community-based study published in June 2026 showed “limited implementation, incomplete compliance, and substantial circumvention of social media restrictions” in the three months that followed since the ban took effect in December 2025.
The Philippine Senate’s version of the social media bill passed almost unanimously, save for Sen. Risa Hontiveros, a children and women’s rights champion. Hontiveros, in explaining her sole dissenting vote, said she prefers “tiered restrictions” for adolescents instead of a blanket under-18 ban. “Our legislation must reflect the realities of how social media has also benefited young people,” Hontiveros said, adding that a sudden prohibition could drive children’s social media underground.
Hontiveros said that, instead of keeping children off platforms, the goal should be to create a safe internet environment. “Taking it away from them all of a sudden without providing adequate ways for them to cope with its absence,” she said, “is not the answer to their needs and it is not the answer to our collective fears.”
What’s been proposed in the bills
Sen. Robinhood Padilla, who sponsored the Senate’s version, told a local radio station that the upper chamber’s measure was necessary to curb not only violence in schools but bad influence on youth as a whole. “This measure must be passed immediately because [social media has] caused a lot of bad things to our youth, especially to minors,” Padilla said on Oct. 11, citing instances of bullying, suicides, and school shootings. “All these problems have compounded over time.”
The Senate’s approved bill increased the threshold of restrictions from the original version’s proposal of covering those under 16 years old to covering everyone under 18 years old. The passed bill proposes disabling or suspending the accounts of minors and banning them from creating new ones. Platforms will be required to have effective age-assurance measures. The Senate’s bill does not cover email, private messaging apps that do not have public or group features, school platforms, news websites, or online gaming platforms focused on gaming and not social networking.
Senate President Sherwin Gatchalian claimed in June that “a lot of young people are addicted to social media and violent games, and studies showed that it has an influence on their mental health.” A clear causal link between violent video gaming and violence has yet to be established.
Under the House proposal, the ban would apply to children under 13 years old. Teenagers under 18 could be on the platforms but would be prohibited from accessing “harmful or prohibited” content, advertisements, livestreams, short-form video, behavior profiling, making purchases, and gambling-like mechanisms. Parents must consent to their children’s use of social media, and this consent would be retractable.
Seeking an answer to school violence
Several school-related incidents rocked the Philippines ahead of the passage of the bills.
In March, Philippine police revealed seven teenagers from the Calabarzon region in Luzon island were allegedly planning a school attack in February. The five boys and two girls, according to police, allegedly shared images and videos of school shootings in other countries. They were turned over to social workers.
Then in June, two male students aged 14 and 15 opened fire in their school in Tacloban City, killing three students. Twenty others were injured in the shooting incident. In turn, Philippine authorities temporarily banned GoreBox, a sandbox-style action game that simulates violence and destruction using weapons.
In August, a high school student from a campus in the southern Philippine city of Zamboanga shot a fellow student in school before killing himself. The shooter livestreamed the attack using a body camera.
Only a month later, a shooting at another southern Philippine high school left two 14-year-old students dead and eight people wounded. The gunman, a teenager also from the school, fatally shot himself. Upon investigation, police found posts the shooter made in an online community where young people involved in school shootings are idolized.
While gun violence is not uncommon in the country, the incidents have forced the Philippines to reckon with a problem it once thought of as unique to the U.S.
But the Philippine Mental Health Association argues that a blanket ban on social media is a “non-solution.” PMHA national executive director Dr. Carolina Uno-Rayco said in a statement to the media Thursday: “Preventing violence requires a comprehensive approach that includes mental health support, safe school environments, responsible online platforms and early identification and intervention.”
Activist group Akbayan Youth argued that the proposed social media ban penalizes young users by disrupting those who depend on them for education and livelihood and called for redirecting the regulation. “Do not punish the youth,” the organization’s national chairperson Khylla Meneses said in a statement. “Hold accountable the platforms that profit from how social media operates.”
