Beyond the Ban: Resisting Authoritarian Solutions to Keeping Kids Safe Online
Parents are reckoning with the complex dangers that unregulated social media platforms pose to their children both in Asia and around the globe. From adverse mental and physical health impacts to sexual exploitation and violence, harms to children have prompted regulators to enact sweeping bans and age-gating laws across a number of Asian countries. These laws, however, pose their own harms: they erect new restrictions on how young people express themselves, and radically alter the way everyone accesses the internet. As tech companies begin to require ID for accessing their services and compromise anonymity online, we must question whether these laws truly help children, or decimate user privacy and embolden authoritarian instincts.
This Computer Says Maybe live show, hosted in partnership with Luminate, will explore the tension between free expression and youth safety online. We’ll ask: do these laws effectively keep children safe? Do they hold tech companies accountable for the harms they’ve willingly facilitated against children? Which communities are further marginalized by ID-driven access regulation? And what would making the Internet truly safe for everyone look like?
This show will feature a conversation with child safety advocates and tech policy experts moderated by Computer Says Maybe host Alix Dunn. Together, they will suggest alternative pathways for regulation, ones that resist tech companies’ data-driven surveillance infrastructure and the harms it creates for children and adults alike.
OUR SPEAKERS
Kate Sim
Director, Children's Online Safety and Privacy Research (COSPR)
Dr. Kate Sim is the Director of the Children's Online Safety and Privacy Research (COSPR) program. She has over 15 years of experience in sexual violence prevention and response, having worked across community organizing, frontline support, government, academia, and industry in Australia, the EU, the US, UK, and South Korea. Most recently, she worked at Google where she shaped product policy on a range of children's safety issues, including non-consensual intimate imagery, financial sextortion, grooming, and help-seeking journeys for people impacted by harmful sexual behaviors.
Fir Redzuan
Founder, Monsters Among Us
Fir advocates for children's rights in all of their diversities. She founded Malaysia-based child rights advocacy NGO, Monsters Among Us (MAU). Currently, she serves as the Advocacy and Strategy Lead in MAU, driving the child rights and youth participation agenda in different civic spaces. In 2026, she represented MAU at the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child State Dialogue and 100th Pre-Session reporting on intersecting issues such as digital rights, female genital mutilation, harms against children from minority and systemically marginalised groups before the UN Child Rights Committee. Her work is guided by human rights standards and to her best capacity, practise the feminist framework of intersectionality and participation.
Octania Wynn
Researcher, ELSAM
Octania Wynn is a researcher at ELSAM (Lembaga Studi dan Advokasi Masyarakat / Institute for Policy Research and Advocacy) in Indonesia, focusing on human rights, civic freedoms, and social justice.
Please note that this live show will be followed by a lunch reception, which finishes at 2pm.
Luminate is a global foundation working to ensure that technology serves our needs and wellbeing.
The Maybe is a critical consultancy, collective and media studio that challenges the power and politics of tech.