"We take our responsibility to young users very seriously and continue to strengthen safeguards in this area."
CONCERNS ABOUT CHILD SAFETY MEASURES
The latest report builds upon the baseline safety measures established in last year's inaugural report, and highlights the areas of weakness the designated social media services - Facebook, HardwareZone, Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube - need to address, as well as improvements they have made over the past year.
While the platforms have made some improvements since 2024, the latest report raised concerns about child safety measures, noting that children could still access age-inappropriate content on several platforms.
Facebook and YouTube were found to have instances where children’s accounts could view content involving nudity or sexual themes, while HardwareZone’s age restrictions were easily bypassed before recent improvements were introduced in end-January.
Although Instagram and TikTok reported more comprehensive child safety features, IMDA said the effectiveness of such measures varied greatly across platforms.
“Given the rapidly evolving online safety risk landscape, especially for children, designated social media services must continue to prioritise enhancing the comprehensiveness and effectiveness of their measures to minimise children’s exposure to harmful and age-inappropriate content,” IMDA said in its report.
More broadly, IMDA found that sexual content, violent content and cyberbullying content were the top three types of harmful content removed by the social media platforms proactively and/or as a result of user reports.
Despite these issues, IMDA said there had been progress since the first report, particularly in faster response times to user reports, which averaged between two and five days in 2025. In 2024, the average time to action was between three and 10 days.
SCORING FOR ONLINE SAFETY
The report aims to help users, including parents, decide for themselves and their children about the risks and available safety measures on various social media sites.
The six social media services were evaluated on how thoroughly and effectively their measures met the Code of Practice for Online Safety.
While none of the six designated social media services achieved an overall rating of five out of five, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube maintained relatively stable overall ratings, with improvements in how quickly they respond to user reports.
HardwareZone also saw slight gains, being the only platform to score full marks in user reporting and resolution.
However, TikTok’s overall rating dipped from 2024, dragged down by the effectiveness of its reporting and resolution mechanisms, which declined significantly in 2025, according to the report.
Instagram and TikTok scored full marks in user safety measures for children, while HardwareZone scored the lowest with 2.5 out of five points.
X, while improving in some areas such as restricting children’s access to adult sexual content, continued to show weak performance in proactively detecting CSEM in 2025.
Transparency remained another weak point. Facebook, Instagram and YouTube were unable to provide detailed Singapore-specific data on how quickly they respond to user reports, limiting users’ ability to assess platform safety.
IMDA said it will continue to monitor platforms closely and review the relevance of its regulations as online threats evolve, adding that it is also studying how to strengthen online safety requirements for children.
