Three Provisions Towards Greater Social Media Platform Transparency in ASEAN

Recently, social media platforms have come under increased scrutiny following a landmark case concerning youth social media addiction in the US. The outcome of the case saw Meta agreeing to pay a US$16.68 billion settlement and make changes to its platforms, including restricting teens’ use of Facebook and Instagram to two hours a day and from midnight to 6am. However, such changes may only be implemented in the US and will not extend to Southeast Asia, potentially leaving users in the region at a disadvantage.

Despite more Southeast Asians, including children and elderly people, using social media platforms to socialise, consume entertainment and keep up with current affairs, platforms provide little information on how social media use impacts users in the region. ASEAN governments need to demand greater transparency from social media platforms regarding how they operate and affect users in the region. This is a relatively modest demand, especially considering that these demands do not mandate the extension of the same product safeguards around youth social media addiction introduced in the US to Southeast Asia.

Nonetheless, ASEAN has initiated steps towards a framework  for safer online spaces. Individual member states like Indonesia and Malaysia are implementing restrictions on children’s access to social media, while Singapore is introducing specific safeguards to reduce harm towards young users, such as banning filters that alter users’ appearances. However, the rapidly expanding range of harms associated with social media are not limited to younger users. Across the region, growing social media use has also been accompanied by evolving dangers including cybersecurity scams, disinformation, misinformation and cyberbullying. On the other hand, solutions and preventive measures have yet to keep pace.

While existing reports on safe content regulation have correctly emphasised the need for greater collaboration between ASEAN governments and social media platforms, this article identifies three specific provisions ASEAN and its member states (AMS) could request from social media platforms to improve internet safety through platform transparency enhancement. First, social media platforms should provide researchers with greater access to social media data. Second, platforms could extend their public transparency reporting to include ASEAN countries, as such reports are currently available only for a limited number of countries and regions. Last, social media platforms should provide greater transparency on advertisements. While advertisement transparency can be seen as a subset of transparency reporting, the sheer amount of data and nuances between the datasets mean that both are generally reported separately.

This author compared the data accessibility and transparency measures of three long-established and prominent social media platforms in the region, namely, TikTok, Meta (Facebook and Instagram) and X and compiled them in Table 1.

Table 1. X (Twitter), Meta and TikTok’s Data Accessibility and Transparency

		Platform
		X (Twitter)	Meta	TikTok
Three Provisions for Better Transparency	Providing Access to Social Media Data	Available to all before 2023. Currently, all data is accessible only through purchase.	Previously accessible to all. Now it is available to researchers from all countries upon registration.	Available to researchers from EU and Brazil.
	Providing Transparency Reports	X released biannual transparency reports for most countries, including those in Southeast Asia, until 2019, but discontinued them in 2024. It has since shifted to a generic global transparency report that covers the platform as a whole without country-specific information.	Available to most countries, the scope of transparency reporting varies across countries. These reports comprises different subsets, including the Widely Viewed Content Reports (WVCR) and Government Requests for User Data reports. However, some information like the WVCR is limited to certain countries.	Available only for EU, Australia, Taiwan, UK.
	Providing Advertisement Transparency	Available to researchers from EU and Brazil.	Available to all researchers for political and social issues advertisements; All ads are available to researchers from EU and Brazil.	Available to researchers from EU and Brazil.

Source: Compiled by author.

Historically, X and Meta provided transparency reports and access to social media data to ASEAN countries, but such access has been discontinued. Meta currently makes advertisement and data transparency accessible to most researchers and countries. However, access remains uneven, as ASEAN countries are excluded from data related to Meta’s algorithms and recommender systems. Comparatively, TikTok has special arrangements in the European Union (EU) and Brazil, but not ASEAN, to provide greater access to social media data, advertisement transparency and transparency reports. TikTok also provides country-specific transparency reports for Australia and Taiwan following government requests.

X provides access to its data, but only through a paywall. Introduced in 2023 as part of X’s changes under Elon Musk, this move saw the platform become less transparent. Previously, researchers and users could access X’s data more freely, which was crucial for studies on online safety and the spread of misinformation. Meanwhile, TikTok’s data has largely remained inaccessible, except to eligible researchers in the EU and Brazil.

This disparity results from the EU’s status as a supranational body and its legal and regulatory mechanisms such as the Digital Services Act (DSA), which requires all online platforms and services, including social media networks, to provide greater access to data and information. Likewise, Brazil presents an interesting example of a country that has taken social media platforms to task, maintaining that companies must take greater responsibility for the content they host. As proven possible by the EU and Brazil, ASEAN governments should take similar steps to emulate such regulations and mechanisms for data collection, access and reporting.

The first provision that ASEAN governments can engage with social media platforms on is to improve researchers’ access to social media data for the region. Social media data here refers to data relating to interactions with a post on each platform, including likes, shares and bookmarks. Allowing researchers to access platform data does not mean free rein over a platform’s data; instead, companies could take a lead from Meta, which allows only vetted researchers-controlled data access. To access such data, researchers must register accordingly, disclose their funding sources and the purposes for which they require the data. Such arrangements are ideal because they allow Meta to track who is accessing the data and for what purposes, thereby preventing a recurrence of incidents involving the misuse of social media data.

A second provision for ASEAN governments is to request that social media platforms provide transparency reports. Transparency reports detail information on a platform’s operations and country-specific moderation activities. This includes information on country-specific issues that platforms have encountered and addressed, such as astroturfing campaigns — the deceptive practice of artificially inflating the volume of apparent public support — and the number of bot accounts removed. These reports may also include the number of content restriction requests received, which refer to requests from governments, regulators and courts to restrict posts or comments from being shown within their respective countries.

Transparency reports are particularly important in Southeast Asia where ill-intentioned actors, manipulate or exploit social media platforms to influence public opinion. These tactics can include coordinated campaigns that overwhelm the platform with comments or its users with direct messages, as well as efforts to artificially amplify one-sided or misinformed narratives. This was evident during the Thai-Cambodian conflict, when both sides posted biased content in high volumes and flooded comment sections to sway public opinion and pressure opposing voices.

X’s global transparency reports include considerably less country-specific information about such activities, and only provides transparency reports to the EU in compliance with the DSA. This contrasts with Twitter’s previous approach, which publicly disclosed specific information operations, including a 926-account network linked to the Royal Thai Army in 2020, and made datasets available to independent researchers. Under Elon Musk’s leadership, researchers have shown that X’s algorithm skews user feeds towards far-right and conservative content that favours Musk’s beliefs.

Meta is the most cooperative of the three platforms as it publishes semi-annual transparency reports. However, one critical subset of Meta’s transparency report is only available in the US: Meta’s “Widely Viewed Content Report” (WVCR). The WVCR shows the most widely viewed content on Facebook as well as insights into how Meta’s algorithm shapes users’ feed. A similar report for Southeast Asia would be highly beneficial, especially if it provides data specific to AMS. ASEAN-specific WVCR reports would include much-needed data on issues such as child safety and the types of content that children may encounter on social media. These reports could help researchers better understand how recommendation algorithms shape users’ feeds, social media use and addiction across different regions.

The third provision is providing open access to information about the advertisements run on its platform. In this domain, Meta again takes the lead and provides a good example of advertisement transparency. Through its Ad Library, users and researchers can access political and social advertisements that are run across Meta’s platforms. Meta provides in-depth details, including the estimated amount spent boosting such advertisements and the numerical breakdown of its recipients. Meanwhile, X and TikTok only provide limited forms of advertisement transparency in jurisdictions such as the EU and Brazil. TikTok, for example, provides the estimated number of unique users reached by an advertisement in each country, while X provides information on the period during which an advertisement was displayed, the number of users reached, and the entity that funded it.

Overall, rather than ASEAN mirroring the EU’s DSA or AMS adopting the initiatives wholesale, ASEAN countries can take an à la carte approach to pick and choose the most effective measures to implement in their respective countries. Singapore, for example, has recently implemented its own advertising-related policy that requires social media platforms to first verify advertisers’ identities against official records. ASEAN could also draw on its past practices by developing guidelines vis-à-vis the recommended provisions (as it has done to combat fake news and disinformation) and organise forums where AMS can exchange experiences and ideas to make the internet a safer and more transparent place.

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Editor’s Note:
ASEANFocus+ articles are timely critical insight pieces published by the ASEAN Studies Centre.