Dr Chew Han Ei, a senior research fellow and head of Governance and Economy at IPS, agreed that when tech companies put their resources into age verification, fixing the source of online harms, such as algorithms, may end up on the back burner.
Another concerning possibility is that young people may relocate to less regulated platforms, said Dr Chew, who was also the principal investigator of the IPS research on perceived severity of online harms.
An example is the closed-messaging platform Telegram, which made headlines in Singapore in 2019 for hosting an obscene chat group called SG Nasi Lemak.
“It could be that the online harms on the regulated platforms will drop because the young people are no longer on it, but that’s what you can see … what we might not be able to see is the migration to other platforms where the online harms could be happening,” he said, adding that the regulatory eye on those platforms may not be trained.
