Vietnam Drafts 'Muted Account' Rules to Restrict Social Media for Children

Vietnam has drafted new rules that would let children under 16 keep social media accounts while stripping away their ability to post, comment or react to content, an approach officials are billing as more measured than the outright bans other countries have pursued.

How the proposed rules would work

Under the draft decree from Vietnam's Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, accounts belonging to users under 16 would be registered under a parent's name, with the parent responsible for monitoring what their child sees and does on the platform. Social media companies operating in Vietnam would be required to deploy technical measures capable of identifying which users are children and restricting them to age-appropriate content, effectively pushing platforms to build age-verification and content-filtering systems specifically for the Vietnamese market.

Why officials are calling it 'muted' rather than banned

Deputy Culture Minister Phan Tam was explicit that the goal isn't to shut children out of social media entirely, framing the approach instead as ensuring children experience "an age-appropriate environment when they do use it." That distinction, allowing passive viewing while blocking active participation like posting and commenting, has been described as an inventive middle path compared to the blunter bans some other governments have proposed, since it preserves some access while removing the specific behaviors, posting personal content, engaging with strangers in comments, that tend to carry the highest risk.

Gaming gets its own restrictions

The draft decree doesn't stop at social media. It also proposes capping gaming time for users under 16 at 60 minutes per day per game, again requiring parental account registration to enforce the limit. Pairing the social media rules with gaming restrictions suggests Vietnamese officials view both as part of the same underlying concern about how much unsupervised screen time and digital engagement children are accumulating, rather than treating social platforms and games as separate policy problems.

Vietnam isn't acting alone

Vietnam's proposal joins a growing wave of similar restrictions internationally. Australia became the first country to implement comprehensive youth social media restrictions, doing so in December, and multiple other governments have since moved toward their own versions of age-based access limits. What sets Vietnam's approach apart within that broader trend is the specific "muted account" mechanism, most other countries pursuing this kind of policy have leaned toward hard age minimums and full account bans rather than a partial-access model that keeps children visible on the platform while limiting what they can actually do there.

The reasoning behind the crackdown

Officials cited a now-familiar list of concerns driving the policy: cyberbullying, addiction, mental health effects, and exposure to predators, the same cluster of harms that has driven youth social media legislation and enforcement actions in multiple countries over the past few years. What differs from country to country is less the diagnosis than the prescription, and Vietnam's answer, muted rather than banned, adds a genuinely distinct policy option to a global conversation that has so far mostly debated all-or-nothing access.

What happens next

The decree remains in draft form and could still be revised before final adoption, meaning the specific mechanics, particularly how platforms are expected to reliably verify a user's age in the first place, remain open questions. If Vietnam does implement the muted-account model as currently proposed, it will offer other governments watching this space a real-world test case for whether partial restriction can deliver meaningful child-safety benefits without the enforcement and evasion problems that have complicated outright age-based bans elsewhere.