The MCMC’s first formal Section 39 enforcement under the Online Safety Act 2025 lands on TikTok, with a maximum financial penalty of RM10 million in play if the platform fails to deliver an enforceable moderation plan.
Malaysia’s Communications and Multimedia Commission has issued a formal statutory demand to TikTok over what regulators describe as a persistent failure to moderate offensive content on the platform, Reuters reported on Thursday.
The demand is the first visible Section 39 enforcement action under the country’s Online Safety Act 2025, which has been in force since 1 January 2026.
The regulatory framework the demand sits inside is the deemed-licensing regime Bloomberg first detailed in December 2025, under which large social-media platforms with at least eight million Malaysian users (TikTok, Meta, Telegram, WeChat) are automatically treated as licensees under the Communications and Multimedia Act 1998.
MCMC’s January 2026 enforcement notice formally activated the statutory-duty framework. Section 39 of the ONSA permits the MCMC to impose a financial penalty of up to RM10 million on a non-compliant provider, recoverable as a civil debt.
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Communications Minister Fahmi Fadzil has been escalating publicly toward this enforcement point for nearly nine months. Free Malaysia Today’s September 2025 coverage carried his warning that TikTok ‘may face legal action for failing to address repeated concerns about content moderation’. The specific operating gap regulators have cited is the platform’s response on Tamil-language live-streaming and short-form video moderation.
Between January and August 2025, MCMC requested removal of 86,732 TikTok videos and reports an 86% removal rate, with 10,730 videos not taken down. The new statutory demand, on the available framing, requires TikTok to file a formal moderation plan with measurable headcount commitments and to evidence compliance over a defined window.
TikTok’s earlier responses to MCMC engagement sessions have failed to satisfy the regulator on the specific question of how many Tamil-language and Malay-language moderators are reviewing content inside TikTok Live and short-form.
The September 2025 meeting at which Fahmi escalated to the public-threat posture, on FMT’s account, was the third such session in which the moderator-headcount answer was not provided in numerical form.
The international regulatory backdrop is thicker than Malaysia’s specific demand. Ofcom’s Online Safety Act enforcement track in the UK is running comparable Section-equivalent demands against TikTok, Roblox, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube, with active fines already issued at the £520,000-£1.05m level against smaller non-compliant providers.
The FTC complaint filed by Fairplay and the NCSE against Roblox in the US this week sits inside the same broader arc of platform-accountability enforcement, with child-safety as the leading vector. Malaysia’s posture, on the Bloomberg framing, has positioned the country as the most active Section 39-style regulator in Southeast Asia.
What the demand does not specify, on the available reporting, is the exact window TikTok has to file the moderation plan, the specific failure events that triggered the formal demand (as opposed to the cumulative engagement-session history), or the financial-penalty figure being calibrated against the RM10 million statutory cap.
The reporting on Thursday is the first visible test of that line. TikTok’s response, expected inside the statutory window, will be the next proof point of how the deemed-licensing regime translates into operational moderation commitments by the largest platforms reaching Malaysian users.
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