South Korea’s regulator says Meta’s teen limits should apply everywhere, not just America

South Korea’s media regulator has said that Meta’s new protections for young users should ideally apply worldwide rather than only in the markets that forced them, which is a modest-sounding statement with a substantial ask inside it.

The measures in question come from Meta’s settlement with US state attorneys general, and the company has already signalled that they do not travel automatically.

The Korea Media and Communications Commission said in a statement that social media providers needed to take greater responsibility for protecting minors.

It also pointed out that seven bills aimed at strengthening youth protection on social platforms are currently sitting in the National Assembly.

What Meta agreed to in the United States is unusually specific for a settlement of this kind. Accounts belonging to under-18s get a default two-hour daily limit across Facebook and Instagram combined, access blocked between midnight and 6am, and notifications switched off between 8am and 3pm on school days.

There is more besides: a chronological feed option that bypasses the recommendation algorithm, stronger AI-based age estimation, hidden like counts on teen accounts, and restrictions on cosmetic surgery and makeup filters.

An independent auditor checks compliance, a court still has to approve the arrangement, and $5.3bn of the money is contingent on TikTok and YouTube matching the terms.

Meta has been fairly direct that none of this crosses a border by itself. Asked whether Canadian teenagers would get the same protections, the company said it would “continue to monitor how these changes are working in the U.S. and engage in productive dialogue with other governments”.

That is precisely the gap the Korean regulator is pointing at. A product change negotiated in an American courtroom becomes a floor for American teenagers and a subject for discussion everywhere else, which is an odd way to distribute a safety feature.

It is worth being exact about what the commission has actually done, which is talk. This was a statement given to a news agency rather than a formal request, with no legal instrument cited, no deadline attached, and no order issued.

The commission does know how to do the formal version when it wants to. In January it used the Information and Communications Network Act to require X to draw up youth protection measures for Grok and report back on the results, which is a materially different sort of intervention.

The caution has a history behind it. Korea’s 2011 “shutdown law”, which blocked under-16s from online games after midnight, was abolished in 2022 as unworkable, and chairman Kim Jong-cheol has said a “customized and phased approach based on public deliberation” would be preferable to repeating that experience.

The bills waiting in parliament cover a wide spread of approaches. They range from barring under-14s from joining social networks outright, to restricting personalised recommendation algorithms for minors, to a daily usage cap for under-16s that looks a great deal like what Meta has just accepted in America.

Korea is not the only jurisdiction making this argument this week. Australia’s communications minister Anika Wells said platforms have always had the ability to protect young people and have simply chosen not to deploy it, while the Philippines’ technology secretary said he hoped the settlement would help his own discussions with the company.

Europe has been pressing the same case through binding channels rather than statements, with the Commission finding that Meta’s autoplay and infinite scroll breach the Digital Services Act. Whether persuasion or proceedings produces faster change is currently being tested in real time across several continents.

Korea’s standing to make the request is contested from the other direction, as it happens. Republicans on the US House Judiciary Committee wrote to the commission’s chairman this month objecting to a separate amendment of that same Network Act, arguing it is aimed at American platforms, which makes a Korean call for the global application of an American settlement a rather loaded piece of diplomacy.