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President Julius Maada Bio has announced his intention to propose age-based restrictions on social media usage in Sierra Leone, citing the urgent need to protect the nation’s youth from the negative impacts of unregulated digital access.
The President made the remarks on Wednesday while delivering an address during Eid prayers in the capital.
During his speech, President Bio emphasized that while social media is a “beautiful technology” that offers valuable learning opportunities, it also possesses the potential to cause significant harm to unsupervised children.
Focusing specifically on minors under the age of 16, Bio argued that the government and society must actively guide their digital consumption to secure the country’s future.
“All things are on social media; you can learn, [or] you can spoil yourself,” the President warned. “Because our future is in the younger ones, we need to make sure they come out well.”
Bio noted that access should be restricted until youth reach a certain level of maturity, at which point the government would “give them the freedom to make the choice if they want to go bad or otherwise.”
To support his impending proposition, President Bio pointed to international trends regarding digital regulation. He noted that other nations are already taking decisive steps to limit children’s access to digital platforms, explicitly citing Australia’s recent actions and ongoing legislative debates in the United Kingdom as models for Sierra Leone to consider.
“Australia has done it. The United Kingdom is debating it because they are seeing the impact of social media,” he stated.
Beyond the impact on minors, the President also used the address to criticize the broader societal addiction to smartphones among adults.
He observed that excessive screen time is negatively affecting productivity and parenting across the country. “There are many adults with social media that cannot do anything good because their attention is buried inside that phone, that they cannot pay attention to their child or the work they should do,” he remarked.
President Bio concluded by urging citizens to prepare for upcoming regulations, confirming his commitment to formally introduce a proposition to control social media use for certain age groups in Sierra Leone.
