AN INTERNATIONAL study in 2025 discovered that 96 percent of children ages 10 to 15 were using social media for hours every day, as many as seven in 10 had experienced being groomed by adults, and half of them had suffered bullying online. The harmful content they saw online was emotionally disturbing, and they even visited sites telling kids to kill themselves.
In the Philippines, telcos and ISPs allow these platforms to be available to children without screening and installing artificial intelligence (AI)-powered software that can block sexual abuse images and videos, and the livestreaming of such abuse aimed to gratify foreign pedophiles who pay the abused children’s parents or relatives to commit these crimes.
Foreigners arrested in France and Switzerland have been convicted for the sexual abuse of Filipino children online. This is evidence that there is no AI-powered blocking software to stop them.
The question is, are the telcos committing a more serious heinous crime by allowing such illegal content to flow through their lines unblocked, unscreened and unhampered?
The implementing rules and regulations of RA 11930 allow the Anti-Money Laundering Council to freeze or confiscate properties associated with Osaec activities. It is recommended that certain ISPs be closed down and certain properties of telco executives be confiscated.
Again, telcos are mandated by law to install software to intercept and delete all images and videos of, and block the livestreaming of, child sexual abuse. But they only report abusive websites to the Internet Watch Foundation, a United Kingdom-based nongovernment organization. The abusive content is uploaded on a new website within days.
Such harmful content that children can easily view on their mobile phones or computers can damage them, and even prompt or entice some of them to abuse other children. The world, through the abuse of the Internet, is becoming sex-obsessed. The dangerous sites the children visited were not only Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, X and YouTube, but also Reddit and streaming platforms Kick and Twitch.
Australia’s social media ban is being studied worldwide and puts the responsibility on telcos and social media companies to protect children. What can National Telecommunications Commission Commissioner Ella Blanca Lopez, and Deputy Commissioners Jon Paulo Salvahan and Alvin Bernard Blanco do to protect Filipino children at grave risk? Impose fines for noncompliance?
Stephen Scheeler, former chief executive officer of Facebook for Australia and New Zealand, once told the media: “It takes Meta about an hour and 52 minutes to make AU$50 million in revenue.” How much more do Philippine telcos earn in one hour?
Their astronomical earnings can buy anything, and their threat to close the internet, if held to account, makes them more powerful than any government agency, even more powerful than President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. himself. He has said he was shocked by how much abusive material at young people was available. What is at stake is the well-being, and mental and emotional health of Filipino children, but it seems some powerful and morally corrupt tycoons control the nation./PN
