The Department of Communications wants YouTube, TikTok and other video-sharing platforms to run age verification in South Africa, gating content that could impair the physical, mental or moral development of minors.

The proposal sits in the Draft White Paper on Audio and Audiovisual Media Services and Online Safety, gazetted as General Notice 3369 in Gazette 52972 on 11 July 2025.

Comment closed on 26 September 2025 after an extension, and the department is still working through submissions from bodies including the CSIR, Sanef and the Freedom of Expression Legal Network.

This is the fourth run at the same policy. A version went out for comment in 2020, another in July 2023 as Gazette 49052, and the current one last July with its deadline pushed from 10 August to 26 September. The department published some of the written submissions on its own website in December 2025. More to the point, the DCDT told Parliament on 24 February 2026 that a final National Policy on Audio and Audiovisual Media Services would be gazetted before 31 March 2026.

That date has passed. Buried further down the same document are proposals to lift the foreign ownership cap in linear individual audiovisual content services from 20% to a maximum of 49%, and to scrap cross-media ownership limits including the distinction between AM and FM sound broadcasting licences.

MyBroadband notes the UK's Online Safety Act requires highly effective checks such as facial age estimation or ID upload, and that Australia banned under-16s from social media outright in 2024. The gazetted draft lists protection of children as a guiding principle and proposes an ombudsman as the first stage of the new framework. Ellipsis, which tracks the process, recorded the missed March gazetting commitment.

The child protection aim is legitimate, and the debate is a real one. It is also genuinely hard: the UK's regime pushed large numbers of users to VPNs almost immediately, and Australia's under-16 ban has been messy in implementation, so reasonable people land in different places on whether ID checks to watch a video are proportionate.

But this is the part of the document least likely to bind anyone soon. It needs an ombudsman that does not exist, enforcement against companies with no local establishment, and a policy that has now missed its own gazetting deadline on a fourth draft spanning six years.

The clause worth reading closely is the foreign ownership cap moving to 49% alongside the removal of cross-media limits. That changes who can buy South African broadcast and media assets, and provisions like that tend to survive redrafts because somebody wants them. If you own or advise a media business here, that line matters more than the one about TikTok.

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