Hong Kong to strengthen safeguards for minors’ use of AI and social media | Digital Watch Observatory

Hong Kong has met the question of what AI and social media are doing to children with the most Hong Kong answer available: a task force. The Chief Executive's 2026 Policy Address, delivered on 16 September, proposed a dedicated body to study minors' social media use, and the government is now developing what it calls a multi-pronged approach — legislative, administrative and educational measures, all three nouns deployed simultaneously. Multi-pronged, in the dialect of policy papers, translates roughly to 'we have identified three categories'. The prongs have not been located, sharpened, or assigned to anyone in particular.

Officials have been careful to note that any new measures would be subject to public consultation, which is the regulatory equivalent of 'let's do lunch'. Consultation is where online harms go to be metabolised into a PDF, and the pattern is well travelled: announce the task force, consult widely, then announce that the consultation has generously revealed the need for further consultation. Digital Watch Observatory reports the plan without a single date attached to a single measure. The 2026 Policy Address has a date — 16 September. The protections do not.

There is something almost admirable in the scope: AI and social media bundled into one file, minors named as the protected class. That is an admission, quietly filed, that the two have fused into a single continuous surface — and that the toolkit for it consists of legislation that does not yet exist, administration by officials who have not been named, and educational measures aimed at the one demographic that already understands the product better than the people regulating it. The task force will produce something, because task forces always do. What it will not produce, on the evidence of every predecessor, is a date. Hong Kong will consult; the children will keep scrolling.