Sri Lanka is finalising guidelines intended to stop children being used on social media for commercial gain and online popularity — a practice known as “kidfluencing” — the Ministry of Women and Child Affairs has said. The guidelines have been drafted by a panel of experts and are expected to be implemented in the near future.
Minister Saroja Savithri Paulraj said the Ministry was preparing them together with the National Child Protection Authority (NCPA), with the aim of promoting a child-friendly media culture, the Daily Mirror reported at 5.51 p.m. Colombo time on Wednesday.
What prompted it
The Ministry’s stated concern is adults involving children in dangerous activities, obscene content and material intended for adult audiences, in order to attract attention online and generate income. Children’s privacy and welfare must be protected, the Minister said, and parents do not have the right to expose children to such risks for fame or financial benefit.
She repeated a warning this desk reported on Tuesday: children placed in serious danger through irresponsible social media practices could be treated as vulnerable and may require protective intervention.
This is the instrument behind Tuesday’s statement
The Minister made substantially the same argument on Tuesday — that parental authority does not extend to consenting to a child’s commercial exposure online, and that protective guardianship might become necessary in some cases. That statement was a position; Wednesday’s filing names the instrument.
The new material is concrete: the drafting body (an expert panel), the implementing partner (the NCPA), the stage (being finalised), and a timeframe (the near future). Readers should treat the two reports as one continuing ministerial position rather than two separate announcements.
The international comparison
The filing places the move alongside measures elsewhere. France and the US state of California have adopted legal protections covering children’s participation in online content and the handling of income earned from it. Some of those measures require earnings to be safeguarded for the child’s future benefit, and restrict children’s participation in content production.
The Minister said Sri Lanka also aimed to establish a framework strengthening protection for minors and bringing greater responsibility to social media practices involving children.
The policy thread
The underlying question has been live for months. The ministry warned parents in September against posting photographs and videos of children, citing platform monetisation and the risk of images being reworked by artificial intelligence into explicit material. In May, a ministry-linked committee recommended barring under-12s from social media.
Not reported
The filing does not say when the guidelines will be issued, in what form, or whether they will carry legal force — whether they are advisory, regulatory, or the basis of future legislation. It does not name the experts on the drafting panel, say when the panel was appointed, or state whether a draft has been published for comment.
It names no enforcement mechanism and no penalty, does not say who would monitor compliance, and does not say whether the French or Californian earnings-protection model is among the measures Sri Lanka is considering adopting. It gives no figures for how many children the Ministry believes are affected, and cites no case or complaint.
It also does not say where or when the Minister spoke.
Single source. A search of other verified newsrooms found no independent report of the guidelines at the time of writing. Ada Derana reported on government plans for laws on children and social media earlier in the week, but its site has returned an HTTP 403 block to this desk for some 48 consecutive days and that report could not be fetched or date-verified, so it is not cited.
