83% of Nigerians support social media restrictions for children, survey finds

More than four in five Nigerians want the government to regulate children’s access to social media, according to a new survey, and most of them want the minimum age set higher than the global standard.

The findings come from a public consultation poll commissioned by the Federal Ministry of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, titled ‘Proposed Social Media Age Regulation in Nigeria‘. Communications Minister Bosun Tijani released the results on Thursday at a roundtable on children’s online safety in Lagos, organised by his ministry alongside the Nigeria Data Protection Commission.

A survey of 585 Nigerians, of whom 98.6% were Nigerian citizens, explored opinions on restricting children’s access to social media. The results showed that 83.4% of respondents supported some form of regulation. Among those in favour of regulation, 64.5% believed the minimum age for social media use should be 16 or 17.

This proposed age limit is higher than the current global standard of 13, which platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and X currently use.

The number that stands out most is not the support for regulation but the anxiety behind it. An overwhelming 93.5% of respondents said they were concerned about children’s safety on social media, and of that group, 69.2% described themselves as extremely concerned. The top risks identified were exposure to harmful or inappropriate content (90.9%), digital addiction (83.6%), and online grooming (82.4%).

What is actually happening to children across social media platforms

Those fears are grounded in a rapidly worsening global reality, one that Nigeria is not insulated from.

The increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) is a significant concern. The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) in the UK, which monitors online child abuse material, reported a dramatic 26,385% increase in AI-generated child sexual abuse videos from 2024 to 2025. This jumped from 13 videos in 2024 to 3,443 in 2025.

The creation of these videos requires very little technical skill. AI tools can produce realistic deepfake images of a specific child in just 15 minutes, using as few as 20 existing photos. In February 2026, UNICEF issued a warning that over the previous year, at least 1.2 million children in 11 countries had their images altered into sexually explicit deepfakes.

The mechanism is frighteningly simple. A child posts a normal photo on Instagram. Someone downloads it. An AI tool strips the clothing from the image. The resulting fake is used for blackmail or shared in illegal networks.

Schools in the United Kingdom have begun removing student photos from their websites entirely because of this threat. A 15-year-old girl was sent a realistic fake nude built from her public Instagram pictures by someone she had never interacted with.

Online grooming, where adults build false trust with children online before exploiting them, has followed the same upward curve. The NSPCC recorded more than 7,000 online grooming offences in the UK in 2023/24, the first time that count had exceeded that number, and an 89% increase since 2017. Globally, reports of online enticement reached 1.4 million in 2025, a 156% jump from the year before.

Also read: Egypt to launch dedicated SIM card for minors to regulate social media access

Beyond exploitation, there is the slower, quieter damage of addiction. Research from Covenant University found that excessive smartphone use among Nigerian students was linked to poor academic performance and psychological distress. A 2025 Pew Research survey found that nearly half of teenagers globally said social media had a mostly negative effect on people their age.

Social media is not without value for children; it has enabled learning, creative expression, peer connection, and access to information in ways that were impossible a generation ago. Nigerian children have used it to build audiences, access global education, and connect with communities outside their immediate environment.

The argument has never been that the internet is bad. It is that platforms designed primarily to maximise engagement time have no real incentive to protect the youngest people using them.

That is exactly what the Nigerian survey’s closing numbers reflect. A striking 97.6% of respondents backed a duty-of-care framework requiring platforms to proactively prevent harm, not just respond to it after it happens. And 74.5% believed children and parents currently lacked adequate awareness of the legal consequences of cyber offences.

Australia became the first country in the world to implement a full ban on social media for under-16s at the end of 2025. France, Spain, and the UK have since moved toward similar restrictions. Nigeria has not yet passed legislation, but Thursday’s roundtable and the numbers behind it suggest the Ministry is building the evidence base to act. Whether that leads to a law, and how quickly, is the next question.