Murder in Malaysia inflames debate on mandatory identity checks for social media

The scenario is eerily familiar: “A 14-year-old male student was charged on Oct 22 with the murder of his 16-year-old female schoolmate, and will undergo psychiatric evaluation to determine whether he is fit to stand trial.” It sounds a lot like the plot of the acclaimed TV series, Adolescence, right down to the multiple stab wounds – except the setting here is not the UK but Malaysia, and the story is not fiction.

The case is stirring the coals of the national debate over online safety measures. According to the Straits Times, Malaysian authorities were already looking at the role social media has played in a rise in school violence. That consideration factored it into Malaysia’s plan to require all social media platforms to implement electronic Know Your Customer (eKYC) identity verification, to ensure no one under 13 is signing up for an account. The killing will only make calls for regulation louder.

The age threshold could rise, too: Free Malaysia Today cites statements from communications minister Fahmi Fadzil, who says the government is “mulling raising the minimum age for social media users to 16.” That would put it in line with Australia’s incoming social media prohibition, which comes into effect on December 10.

Fadzil says any law “will be implemented in line with existing laws, including the Personal Data Protection Act, which regulates commercial transactions.” An exact timeline is forthcoming.

Mandatory identity verification for social media is a step beyond what many countries are proposing as policy. It is tied to demonstrable violence in Malaysia: the victim, Yap Shing Xuen, was killed in her school’s washroom, with a knife purchased online. The country has seen cases of gang rape and deaths from alleged bullying in schools. And authorities say eKYC will also help curb increasing online scams.

Still, the plan has received pushback from privacy advocates.

Rashaad Ali, managing director at Malaysian think-tank Social and Economic Research Initiative (SERI), says it “continues this trend of shifting the burden of responsibility away from platforms and onto users.”

“This doesn’t address the issue of how platforms perpetuate harmful, violent and/or misogynistic content, while making the assumption that identity verification will curb the consumption of harmful content. We need to spend more time addressing content creation and dissemination on social platforms instead of acting after the fact.”

The issue of liability in the case of social media platforms is muddied by the massive campaign its legal representation has launched to fight legislation. NetChoice, which represents Meta, X, Snapchat, Reddit and YouTube, among others, has launched retaliatory lawsuits across the U.S., and the social media giants have won the questionable support of the White House in their objections to UK and EU online safety laws. They lean heavily on the issue of free speech – a more convincing argument for social platforms than for pornography streaming sites.

Yet the problems caused, at least in part, by their products can no longer be shrugged away. If the first phase of the social media empire was “move fast and break things” and the second was “bring the world closer together,” the third is looking to see what was broken, and what our new connections have cost us.

Article Topics

age verification  |  children  |  digital identity  |  identity verification  |  KYC  |  Malaysia  |  social media