Singapore's Parliament passed amendments to the Online Safety (Miscellaneous Amendments) Bill on 12 August 2026, imposing a statutory duty of care on social media services and online platforms to take reasonable steps to protect child users from harmful content and contact, including grooming, sexual exploitation, cyberbullying and self-harm material. The amendments, which will take effect in November 2026, empower the Infocomm Media Development Authority to issue codes of practice specifying risk assessment, safety-by-design and proactive monitoring measures, and introduce financial penalties of up to one million Singapore dollars per breach or 10 percent of annual turnover for designated platforms.
A statutory duty of care sets the expectation that platforms act reasonably to protect children but does not itself specify how harm in direct messages is to be intercepted before a child is affected. AI-driven real-time monitoring provides one mechanism to meet that duty. Guardii scans direct messages across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, Roblox and other services for grooming, sextortion, child sexual abuse material, age-inappropriate contact, cyberbullying and self-harm signals, blocking or flagging threats before they reach the child and surfacing acute-distress or suicide-risk indicators to a parent, school or professional able to intervene, and enabling platforms and institutional users to demonstrate proactive harm reduction rather than reactive takedown.
