\n<\/p>\n
Several radicalised youths in recent cases had viewed harmful content on social media.<\/p>\n
In the latest case involving the 14-year-old boy, he had \u201cavidly consumed\u201d violent gore and mass shooting content that he encountered on social media, based on algorithmic recommendations as well as on online channels that were linked to the True Crime Community.<\/p>\n
In response to a CNA question on whether a social media ban will solve the issue of youths encountering extremist content online through their algorithms, Mr Shanmugam noted the experience of other countries.<\/p>\n
\u201cA number of approaches have been tried in other countries. Social media bans have been imposed in Australia, the UK has discussed it, France\u2019s parliament has looked at it, with varying degrees of effectiveness,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He added that the Ministry of Digital Development and Information (MDDI) has been speaking publicly about what can be done to protect young people, not just from extremist online content, but also the harmful effects of social media on their development.<\/p>\n
How to best deal with the issue, including whether a ban is the best approach, is a matter that MDDI is looking at, he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut harmful extremist content, when we come across it, we block it. But as I said, in today’s world, it’s not possible to block everything,\u201d said Mr Shanmugam, adding that one of the youths had been radicalised through online gaming platform Roblox.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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SOCIAL MEDIA BAN? Several radicalised youths in recent cases had viewed harmful content on social media. In the latest case involving the 14-year-old boy, he…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":72083,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/dam.mediacorp.sg\/image\/upload\/s--RxlutXZP--\/c_fill,g_auto,h_676,w_1200\/fl_relative,g_south_east,l_mediacorp:cna:watermark:2021-08:cna,w_0.1\/f_auto,q_auto\/v1\/mediacorp\/cna\/image\/2026\/07\/27\/shanmugam_desmond_lee_4.jpg?itok=ZeIkbXES","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[292,10770,1147,27269,3464,27270,848,1890,2417,1158],"class_list":["post-72082","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-buzz-news-sg-global","tag-attack","tag-balancing","tag-free","tag-garrison","tag-movement","tag-plots","tag-school","tag-security","tag-shanmugam","tag-turn","wpcat-2-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72082","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=72082"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72082\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/72083"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=72082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=72082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=72082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}