YouTube today told users in Indonesia younger than 16 that they will soon be unable to publish videos or post remarks on the platform, and that the channels, videos and replies they have already put online will stop being visible to anyone else.

The notice, written in Indonesian and pinned to the YouTube Help Community forum by Tammy Wi, a community manager, ties the change to Government Regulation No. 17 of 2025 on the governance of electronic systems in child protection - the rule known in Indonesia as PP Tunas. It sets no start date. It lands six months after the regulation took effect on March 28, and five and a half months after Google sent the government a letter committing YouTube to a minimum user age of 16.

The stakes extend beyond child safety policy. Indonesia accounted for 3,000 of the 7,600 South-east Asian YouTube channels with more than one million subscribers, according to YouTube data reported by Katadata in June 2025. And the post describes something different from what YouTube said in April, when it told Indonesian users that those under 16 could lose the ability to sign in at all. Today's wording concerns what those users may do, and what everyone else may see.

In Short

YouTube says children under 16 in Indonesia will soon not be allowed to post videos or write comments, and the things they already posted will be hidden from other people. That follows an Indonesian law that keeps children younger than 16 off apps the government considers risky, and it touches young creators, the brands that sponsor them and anyone counting views or engagement in the country. No start date has been given, but each affected account holder is supposed to get an email and an alert in the YouTube app before the change reaches their account.

What the notice says

The post is short. It carries the forum's "Pengumuman" label, used for official notices, and sits pinned at the top of the Indonesian-language community. In its opening paragraph, YouTube states that, as part of its commitment to comply with Indonesian regulation, "we will soon enforce restrictions on YouTube accounts for users in Indonesia who are under the age of 16." The quotations in this article are PPC Land translations of the Indonesian original.

Two examples follow. Users under 16 "will not be able to upload content - including long-form videos, Shorts, and posts - or add comments," according to the post. Then comes the clause with the widest reach: "existing channels, videos, and comments from these users in Indonesia will no longer be visible to other users."

The second paragraph commits YouTube to publishing updates on the same page. It also says that account holders under 16 who are located in Indonesia will receive an email and a notification inside the YouTube app before the change is applied to their account - phrasing that points to an account-by-account rollout rather than a single switch-over date, though the post does not spell that out.

Three details in the wording carry weight. The examples are introduced with "misalnya", Indonesian for "for example", so the list of restricted functions is illustrative rather than exhaustive. The scope covers all three of YouTube's main publishing formats: long-form video, Shorts, and the text and image posts that channels publish alongside their videos. And the visibility clause looks backwards. It applies to material already published, and on a plain reading it reaches remarks those users left beneath other creators' videos, not only content on their own channels.

When the page was captured, the post had collected 60 endorsements and eight replies; the forum's index listed nine replies later in the day. Most replies thanked the community manager in Indonesian. Others arrived in Bengali, Hindi and English. One, in Portuguese, came from a user describing themselves as an adult in Brazil who stressed that every video on their channel was original - a sign that a notice aimed at Indonesian minors is being read, and misread, far outside the country.

What the notice does not say

The gaps are substantial. The post gives no date beyond "segera", or "soon". It does not say whether users under 16 will still be able to sign in and watch, which was the central question raised by YouTube's April notice. It does not mention supervised accounts, the parent-linked accounts YouTube offers to children and teenagers, even though the April notice said the change would cover all supervised child and teen accounts. It does not explain how YouTube will establish a user's age, whether channels run by younger teenagers lose YouTube Partner Program status or earnings, or what happens to channels co-owned with adults. Advertising is not mentioned at all.

YouTube's documentation for other jurisdictions shows what a fuller version looks like. According to its help page for Australia, where a statutory minimum age took effect on December 10, 2025, users under 16 are signed out of YouTube automatically, a rule that extends to supervised child and teen accounts. Signed-out users lose likes, subscriptions, private playlists and memberships. Their channels become invisible to others, and the owner can no longer reach uploads, comments or earnings. The page directs users to Google Takeout to download their data, states that content becomes available again at 16, and applies the restriction to the primary owner of a shared channel. A separate help page for Florida describes the same channel consequences for users aged 13 to 15 who are not in supervised accounts, with parental linking offered to 14- and 15-year-olds.

Indonesia's notice reproduces the Australian visibility consequence. It does not reproduce the sign-out.

A different mechanism from April

YouTube first addressed PP Tunas in the same forum on April 9, 2026. That earlier post, written by a TeamYouTube community manager identified as Jamie, said the regulation may change the minimum age for signing in to YouTube in Indonesia, so that users under 16 could lose the ability to log in. It covered supervised child and teen accounts, pointed users to Google Takeout, said their data would be accessible again at 16, and promised more information over the following months. By today, that April thread had drawn 171 replies and 400 endorsements, according to the forum's index.

On April 22, Communications and Digital Minister Meutya Hafid told a press conference in Jakarta that Google had delivered a compliance letter to the ministry's Directorate General of Digital Space Supervision. The letter was submitted on April 17, according to Asia News Network. The minister said YouTube had supplied a plan to deactivate accounts belonging to children under 16 in stages, and would phase out advertisements targeting children and teenagers, according to ANTARA. YouTube's Indonesian help page had been updated to say that access to accounts held by users under 16 in Indonesia may be disabled, according to the same report. Danny Ardianto, YouTube's head of government affairs and public policy for Asia Pacific, told the briefing that the company supported the government's commitment to protecting children and teenagers, according to Kompas.

Two months later the minister put a number on enforcement. YouTube had deactivated 600,000 accounts belonging to children under 16, and TikTok 4.1 million, Meutya Hafid said on June 25, according to The Next Web. That publication put the combined total at about 4.7 million and noted that the figures came from the minister rather than the companies, with little published detail on how the accounts had been identified.

Today's notice sits awkwardly against that record. It describes restrictions YouTube will soon impose, not ones already in force, and it frames them around publishing and visibility rather than deactivation. The post does not mention the 600,000 figure. Nor does it say whether the new restrictions replace the sign-out plan set out in April, apply to accounts that have not yet been deactivated, or run alongside deactivation. None of those readings can be confirmed from the published material. What did "deactivated" mean in Jakarta's June count, if YouTube is only now preparing to stop the same age group from posting? The public record does not say.

How PP Tunas reached this point

The regulation was signed by President Prabowo Subianto and carried a one-year transition period before enforcement began on March 28, 2026, according to Bernama, as published by Malay Mail. Its technical rules sit in Ministerial Regulation No. 9 of 2026, issued on March 6. Under that framework, platforms the government classifies as high-riskmust set 16 as the minimum age for holding an account. Lower-risk services remain open to children from 13, TechCrunch reported in March, a two-tier design that separates Indonesia's approach from Australia's single threshold.

Eight services were named in the first wave: YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, Bigo Live and Roblox. Sanctions under the ministerial regulation run from written warnings through temporary suspension of access to termination of access, according to Kompas.

Google pushed back at first. On March 27, a day before enforcement began, it argued that blanket account restrictions for users below 16 would strip young people of the parental controls and safety features built into supervised accounts, according to CNBC Indonesia. Three days later the ministry issued summons letters to Google and Meta, finding both in breach of the age requirement, according to Bernama; at that point only X and Bigo Live were judged compliant. The minister cited about 70 million users under 16 in the country and average daily screen time of seven to eight hours.

An inspection on April 7 found YouTube had not met its obligations, and the government issued a formal warning, according to the Vietnam News Agency. By April 14, only YouTube and Roblox remained outside the regime, Kompas reported. The April 22 letter made YouTube the seventh of the eight named platforms to commit. All platforms were also required to file self-assessments of their risk classification within three months, a window that closed in June, according to Jakarta Globe.

Indonesia in a widening map of age limits

Indonesia, with about 285 million people, is a far larger market than Australia, the first country to enforce a 16-year account threshold. Australia's restrictions took effect on December 10, 2025 across nine named platforms, including YouTube, with penalties of up to A$49.5 million. The first detailed platform tally from that regime came in August, when Meta disclosed that it had removed access to 756,000 accounts - 462,000 on Instagram and 294,000 on Facebook - between December 1, 2025 and June 30, 2026.

Elsewhere the picture is mixed. The United Kingdom said on June 15, 2026 that it would bar platforms including YouTube from serving children under 16, with regulations targeted for spring 2027. France went the other way when its Constitutional Council struck down an under-15 ban on August 14, 2026, 18 days before it was due to start. In Brussels, the European Commission's draft EU Kids Act sets 15 as the age for unsupervised accounts on risky social media and video-sharing services, and the proposal gives providers six months to disable existing under-15 accounts. Malaysia's communications regulator said in March that it was testing methods for verifying age ahead of a 16-year minimum expected in the second half of 2026, according to Bernama.

YouTube had already drawn a line at 16 for one function. It raised the minimum age for live streaming without visible adult supervision from 13 to 16 on July 22, 2025. Today's notice extends that line from live broadcasting to every other way of publishing on the platform - in one country, under statutory pressure.

Why this matters for marketers

Personalisation was already off, inventory was not

Under-16s in Indonesia were never an addressable segment for personalised advertising on YouTube. Google's policy states that users under 18 are not eligible for it in any form, including predefined Google audiences, and the company consolidated its child and teen advertising protections across YouTube, Display Ads and Display & Video 360 in January 2025. On the publisher side, Google's ad request signals have moved in the same direction, with the TFAT tag adding a dedicated TEEN value on May 18, 2026. The April commitment to phase out ads targeting children and teenagers in Indonesia sits on top of that baseline.

What today's notice alters is contextual supply. A channel that stops being visible stops generating public views, and with them the ad impressions and feed appearances its videos would have carried. That applies to long-form watch pages and to the Shorts feed alike. The made for kids designation, which governs content directed at children and switches off personalised ads on those videos, is a separate mechanism: the notice concerns the age of the account holder, not the intended audience of the content. Adults who make videos for children fall outside the post's wording.

Engagement figures can change after the fact

The retroactive clause has measurement consequences. If remarks written by users younger than 16 disappear from every video, comment totals on channels with young Indonesian audiences could fall with no change in current activity. Historical engagement figures used to price or evaluate creator partnerships could shift after a campaign has ended. Videos published by under-16 creators, including any sponsored integrations, would leave public view along with their view counts. The notice does not say how many Indonesian channels are run by users under 16.

The change also lands in a market where YouTube has been building commercial plumbing. Gifts powered by Crystals reached Indonesian creators in the Partner Program on April 4, 2026, and Indonesia was one of seven markets where YouTube's Creator Partnerships platform was available as of the first quarter of 2026.

Four weeks ago YouTube moved the other side of the age question. Creators who declare branded content can now set a minimum viewing age that differs by country, a per-market form of age-gating aimed at the audience. Today's notice applies an age line to the creator instead.

Who counts as under 16?

How YouTube will identify under-16s in Indonesia is not stated. In the United States, Google began using machine learning on July 30, 2025 to estimate whether account holders are under 18, switching off ad personalisation for those it flags, and YouTube applied age estimation to US users from August 13, 2025, treating accounts as belonging to minors when viewing history suggests they are under 18. Those systems are built around an 18-year line. Indonesia's rule needs a 16-year one, which is harder to draw: Ofcom conceded in a March 2026 consultation that far fewer age assurancetechniques can tell a 14-year-old from a 16-year-old than can separate adults from under-18s.

Errors cut both ways. An under-16 classified as older keeps publishing. An adult classified as younger could find a channel hidden from view, and the notice does not describe an appeal route. The Next Web raised a further question in June that applies equally here: how many barred users return under new accounts with older stated birth dates?

For now, the only commitments on record are the ones in the post itself - an email and an in-app notice before the change reaches each account, and updates on the same page. The date, the full list of restricted functions and the fate of signed-in viewing remain open.

Timeline

Summary

Who: YouTube, through a notice posted by community manager Tammy Wi on its Indonesian-language Help Community forum, addressing users in Indonesia under the age of 16. The change follows commitments Google made to Indonesia's Ministry of Communication and Digital Affairs, led by Meutya Hafid.

What: Users in Indonesia under 16 will not be able to publish content, including long-form videos, Shorts and posts, or add comments. Channels, videos and comments those users have already published will no longer be visible to other users. The listed restrictions are given as examples. The notice does not say whether affected users can still sign in and watch, how age will be determined, or how the change relates to the 600,000 YouTube accounts the minister said had been deactivated by June.

When: The notice was posted today. It says the restrictions will apply soon, without a date, and that affected account holders will receive an email and an in-app notification before their accounts change.

Where: Indonesia, for account holders under 16 located in the country.

Why: Government Regulation No. 17 of 2025, known as PP Tunas, requires platforms classified as high-risk to set 16 as the minimum age for holding an account. Enforcement began on March 28, 2026, and Google committed YouTube to compliance in a letter submitted on April 17 after the government issued summons letters and a formal warning.