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The Countries Looking Away

The third camp is the map's remainder: the governments that watched everything in Part One and did nothing. This is what the stillness looks like, what it costs, and why it is ending.

Tinsel Staff · · 7 min read
The Reckoning, Part Two: The Countries Looking Away — a countdown ring nearly complete, with a red sliver of time remaining before twelve

THE RECKONING · Part Two of a two-part series on how the world’s governments turned on the algorithm, and the question that turned them: how do we protect our children.

EDITOR’S NOTE

This series began with questions raised by Kenneth W. Welch Jr. and the team at Moxie Media Marketing. The reporting, sourcing, and conclusions are Tinsel’s own. Mr. Welch has asked to be on record that he stands behind the questions raised here, and behind the question at the center of the series: how do we protect our children. “It is the only question that matters,” Mr. Welch says. “Everything in these pages is the world starting to answer it.”

In August 2023, a Kenyan citizen petitioned his parliament to ban TikTok. The committee assigned to answer him took two and a half years. In the middle of that silence, in March 2025, BBC Africa Eye published an investigation documenting TikTok livestreams in Kenya in which girls as young as 15 advertised sexual content, with moderators telling the BBC the company knows solicitation occurs on its livestreams; earlier BBC reporting found the platform takes a cut of about 70 percent of livestream gift transactions, a figure TikTok disputes. TikTok told the BBC it has zero tolerance for the exploitation of minors. Kenya's communications regulator responded within days, ordering takedowns, demanding a child-protection plan, and warning of sanctions. Almost eighteen months later, no sanction appears anywhere in the public record. When parliament's answer to the petition finally came, this February, it declined the ban, recommended regulation, and set a four-month deadline for stronger age verification. No implementing law has passed. That sequence, an exposé, a warning, a recommendation, and then quiet, is the third camp's signature. This is the camp of the countries looking away.

It is a large camp, and mapping it honestly means documenting an absence. Mexico has no federal law on minors and platforms; its government spent this summer holding regional forums to design a future proposal, and President Sheinbaum has ruled out a ban outright. Argentina has bills in committee and nothing enacted. Thailand and the Philippines have drafts, hearings, and targets, and as of this summer, no law. Nigeria's House passed a child online protection bill in December; it has sat in the Senate since. A ten-country assessment published in June by the digital-rights coalition CIPESA found child-specific platform protections largely absent across Africa, with the African Union's own child online safety policy still non-binding guidance. Where the laws end, the platforms' own defaults are the only rules in the room, and UNICEF's global mapping this spring counted 36 jurisdictions where age-based restrictions are even being discussed, proposed, or implemented, which is another way of measuring how much of the map is still quiet.

The record from the regulated world shows, by implication, what looking away costs. The internal research that surfaced in American courtrooms, habit formation put at 260 videos, about 35 minutes of watching by Kentucky investigators' arithmetic, does not stop applying at a border where no regulator reads it. Australia's pre-ban surveys found 84 percent of children aged eight to twelve had used at least one social media or messaging service in the past year, most on platforms with a 13-plus minimum age; countries that run no surveys have no number, and no reason to believe theirs is smaller. What children experience is much the same across the camps; what differs is whether anyone in authority is measuring it, and what happens when an investigation like Kenya's lands. In Britain the same BBC newsroom's findings feed an active regulator with fining power. In the third camp they feed a press conference, and then the file closes. The BBC documented the money as well as the livestreams: the platform was taking its cut of them.

The countries still standing in that camp should study what happened to its most famous members, because the third camp has spent two years shrinking. Brazil was its anchor: the region's largest market, wide open. Then came a chain reaction that took fourteen months. The Supreme Federal Court rewrote platform liability in June 2025, holding platforms answerable for grave harms without waiting for court orders. A viral video about the sexualized exploitation of children in monetized content pushed Congress to pass the Digital Statute of the Child and Adolescent, enforceable since March, with age verification, adult accountability for children's accounts, and fines of up to 10 percent of a company's Brazilian revenue. And on August 25, Brazil's data authority fined ByteDance 153.7 million reais over the processing of children's and adolescents' data and ordered a minors' compliance program. Indonesia, whose 2023 TikTok Shop shutdown was trade protection rather than child safety, crossed over this spring: under its new child-protection regulation, the government ordered platforms to deactivate under-16 accounts across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and their peers, the first enforcement of its kind in Southeast Asia. Even the Gulf moved. The United Arab Emirates put a Child Digital Safety law into force on January 1, and a Cabinet resolution issued in June set a minimum age of 15 for social media accounts, with platforms given time to comply. Membership in the third camp now comes with a clock running.

There is a precedent for this kind of clock, and it comes from the same country Part One ended on. For two decades the world ran its electronics, its vehicles, and much of its defense industry on a mineral supply chain concentrated in one place: China mined roughly 69 percent of the world's rare earths in 2024 and refined about 91 percent of the rare earths that go into magnets. The concentration was common knowledge, and no coordinated response ever formed. Then, beginning in 2023, Beijing imposed a series of export restrictions: gallium and germanium, then graphite and antimony, then, in 2025, the rare earths and magnets themselves, announcing, and then suspending before it took effect, a rule extending licensing control to any foreign product containing as little as 0.1 percent Chinese-origin rare earths; the suspension runs on a one-year clock. Auto plants paused for want of magnets. The European Commission's president accused Beijing of "weaponising" a quasi-monopoly; Beijing answered that "export controls are not export bans." The structural lesson reorganized the industrial policy of every major economy within three years: the G7 built a critical-minerals plan, the EU legislated supply benchmarks, and the Pentagon bought into a rare-earth miner directly. The governments in Part One have concluded that their children's attention is another thing the world runs on that is controlled from somewhere else, by rules nobody outside can read. The rare-earth story is what that conclusion looks like a few years further down the road.

So read the trajectory the way a regulator would, as a docket rather than a debate. Between January 2025 and August 2026: the US Supreme Court unanimously upheld a forced-divestiture law, and the ownership of TikTok's American operation was restructured to 80.1 percent non-ByteDance hands. The Justice Department extracted a $400 million settlement over children's privacy. The European Commission issued two sets of preliminary findings against the platform's design for minors. Britain's regulator opened formal proceedings over children's safety. Australia switched on the world's first under-16 law and platforms restricted 4.7 million accounts in its first weeks. France wrote its own under-15 ban into law. Ireland's €530 million fine was upheld in substance at first instance. Brazil legislated, adjudicated, and fined. Indonesia began deactivating children's accounts. The UAE's law took force. And days before the first American jury was to hear a social media addiction case brought for a minor, TikTok settled; terms were not disclosed. The countertrend is real and belongs in the ledger: courts have blocked or struck down platform bans from Montana to Tirana, halted age-verification laws in several American states, and stayed enforcement orders in Dublin, a running reminder that in open societies the how is still contested. What no court anywhere has done is put the question back to sleep.

The man whose questions began this series reads that docket the way a builder reads a survey. "For years the burden sat on parents to prove the harm," says Kenneth W. Welch Jr., the chief executive of Moxie Media Marketing. "Now it sits on the platforms to prove the safety. Once that flips, it does not flip back."

That is the map this series set out to draw: three camps, and a burden of proof that has changed hands. For a decade the question was whether anyone could prove the algorithm harmed children enough to justify acting, and the platforms won that argument by default. Now the internal research is in court records, the coroners' offices and prosecutors have opened their files, and the question has reversed: platforms must prove to regulators, on five continents, in statute after statute, that their designs are safe for children, before the next fine or the next age wall arrives. The world has stopped asking whether to act and started acting, unevenly, imperfectly, and in one direction, and the platforms that redesign themselves first will have a say in what the standard becomes. The ones that wait will find it written for them, in whichever camp's language their largest markets speak. Every statute in this series, from Canberra to Brasília to Abu Dhabi, began as the same sentence spoken in a different accent. How do we protect our children. The countries still looking away are running out of reasons not to answer.

Sources

Previously: Part One, The Ban and the Fine.

Tinsel Staff

Tinsel Staff

Tinsel Magazine's editorial staff reports on culture, entertainment, fashion, internet, art, and style — with an LA lens and an eye for the structural stories most outlets miss. Writers and contributors join us by pitch: contributors@tinselmag.com.

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