Last October, a 17-year old committed suicide after intimate photos of her were distributed on Telegram. It prompted a debate about online harassment. There was a parliamentary question in the National Assembly on 25 November about banning of social media to those under 16 years old. The question was withdrawn and subsequently answered at a latter sitting. On 1 December, a 21-year old committed suicide. The tragic event was live-streamed on Facebook.
The Adolescence TV Series and Australia's social media ban for under 16 were brought up during local discussions of teenagers and social media.
The Ministry of Information Technology, Communication and Innovation (Mauritius) published a proposal to address the need for child online protection on social media in April 2025. The proposal stated that the Cybersecurity & Cybercrime Act 2021 puts the burden on social media platform administrators to regulate online content. It went on to question the effectiveness of the Act given that there wasn't anyone representing social media companies in Mauritius. The proposal quoted an extract of a NAFCO Mauritius Action Plan on the Online Safety of the Youth. However, the NAFCO Action Plan was not publicly available. The proposal included an extract of an email from a primary school stressing that protecting our youth from cyberbulling and social media misuse should be a priority
. The proposal introduced a concept of content moderation
where Internet Service Providers (ISPs) would be filtering Internet traffic to offer clean Internet traffic in Mauritius
.
The Information and Communication Technologies Authority (Mauritius) issued a Telecommunications Directive on 1 December regarding the deployment of child online protection measures by 10 December. The Telecommunications Directive defined a child as a person who is less than 18 years old. It required Internet Service Providers to incorporate child online protection by design in their commercial plans.
The Telecommunications Directive required Internet Service Providers to indicate in their communication campaigns whether they were offering device-level, application-level, or network-level controls to help parents protect their children. The Directive included a list of nine categories of content which may generally be considered as harmful to children.
One of the innovations of the Telecommunications Directive was to require Internet Service Providers to take appropriate and proportionate measures which may include blocking of popular Virtual Private Networks (VPNs).
The Telecommunications Directive also specified that licensees (Internet Service Providers) act as a repository for data through their hosting, caching and storage services
.
The Telecommunications Directive focused on Mobile Network Operators as it referred to mobile phone numbers.
The term social media
is widely used in newspaper articles and in documents published by government agencies. The Oxford Reference defines it as a broad category or genre of communications media which occasion or enable social interaction among groups of people, whether they are known to each other or strangers, localized in the same place or geographically dispersed. Wikipedia stated that it is a free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit
. It has a Talk
page which strangers can use to discuss an article. It would fit within the Oxford Reference definition of Social media
.
There are online services which do not charge its subscribers for access, or for uploading content which can be downloaded by a group of people (subscribers). The online services use information about the subscriber's interaction (what the person read, watch, or click on) or the subscriber's interests to personalize the advertisements which they then display. There is a recommendation algorithm which has a two-fold purpose. The first purpose is to select which ads to show as that is how the online services generate revenue. The second purpose is to select content which will capture the subscriber's attention.
It was not clear whether there is a minimum age to be eligible to subscribe to an online service. If the online service is collecting personal data, it would be regulated, in Mauritius, through the Data Protection Act 2017. Article 30 of the Act states that a person under the age of 16 requires the consent of his/her parent.
Online services were chosen based on whether they use recommendation algorithms. The list was as follows:
Telegram and WhatsApp were not included in the list as the content which those online services show to subscribers were not generated by a recommendation algorithm. It could be argued that subscribers using those services do not experience doomscrolling similar to what a subscriber may experience by flipping through TikTok's FYP
.
Last year, there were reports of children using Virtual Private Networks to circumvent a social network ban. Proton VPN was chosen for testing as the Mobile Network Operators did not publish a list of popular VPNs.
The author typed in www.tiktok.com in a web browser after writing the above text. The following content was displayed:
The content displayed on www.tiktok.com was directly related to some of the content in this article. The author did not search for any information. However, the search box on the web site was automatically filled with search terms related to a person. It is an intriguing coincidence.
There were three Mobile Network Operators, Cellplus Mobile Communications Ltd, EMTEL Limited, and Mahanagar Telephone (Mauritius) Limited, which advertised subscriber plans for child online protection.
Cellplus Mobile Communications Ltd's subscriber plan is known as my.t Child Online Protect
. It uses a solution based on SafeDNS. The plan is described as one which does not replace active parental supervision
. It works at the network level on mobile data. It filters and blocks harmful websites and online content based on ICTA guidelines
.
EMTEL Limited's subscriber plan is known as kids pack
. It is a special mobile plan designed for children. It provides a monthly bundle for calls, SMS, and data that can only be used to access a pre-approved list of safe, educational websites. General internet access is blocked
. The FAQ about the plan stated that YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, etc. are not accessible on this plan
. It is also stated that the safety controls of the Kid Plan work by filtering internet traffic on our mobile network. If your child uses a VPN app while on the plan's mobile data, our system is designed to block that VPN connection to maintain the restricted environment
. The FAQ recommended parental supervision and device-level controls
.
Mahanagar Telephone (Mauritius) Limited's subscriber plan is known as CHILI Kids plan
. It uses Kaspersky Safe Kids Premium. It is an app for parental control. It can be installed on Apple or Android devices.
my.t Child Online Protect
is based on DNS. It was tested by running DNS queries:
$ dig @dns1.safedns.com facebook.com +short
102.132.104.35
$ dig @dns1.safedns.com instagram.com +short
102.132.104.174
$ dig @dns1.safedns.com tiktok.com +short
23.196.227.99
23.196.227.106
23.196.227.112
23.196.227.100
23.196.227.107
23.196.227.98
23.196.227.110
$ dig @dns1.safedns.com youtube.com +short
192.178.54.14
$ dig @dns1.safedns.com linkedin.com +short
150.171.22.12
$ dig @dns1.safedns.com x.com +short
195.46.39.1
$ dig @dns1.safedns.com protonvpn.com +short
195.46.39.1
The DNS replies for X and Proton VPN are 195.46.39.1
. The IP Address falls within a range of IP addresses which was assigned to SafeDNS. It can be deduced that access to X and Proton VPN were blocked.
DNS queries were used to find out whether any of the three Mobile Network Operators were operating WhatsApp Network Appliances:
$ dig sonar.fmru2-1.fna.whatsapp.net +short
105.235.156.162
$ dig sonar.fmru3-1.fna.whatsapp.net +short
197.226.226.98
$ dig sonar.fmru6-1.fna.whatsapp.net +short
41.222.101.224
The IP Addresses in the DNS replies falls within the ranges of IP Addresses assigned to Mobile Network Operators.
Two out of the three Mobile Network Operators filter Internet traffic at the network-level to block access to Virtual Private Networks. That is in line with the Telecommunications Directions which specifically calls out VPN blocking. One of the three Mobile Network Operators did not implement network-level controls. One of them did not allow access to online services which use recommendation algorithms.
The Mobile Network Operators mostly likely act as a repository for data
if they operate, for example, a Google Global Cache or a Facebook Network Appliance on their networks.
Although all the Mobile Network Operators put emphasis on parental guidance, none of them provided an explanation to help parents to tackle potential risks which their children may face online. Furthermore, none of them explained how parents could use the subscriber plans to create age-differentiated experiences online.
The Information and Communication Technologies Authority (Mauritius) stated that it was guided by a 2020 Guidelines for industry on Child Online Protection from the International Telecommunications Union. The nine categories of content which were identified in its Telecommunications Directive is from the United Kingdom's Ofcom instead of the 2020 International Telecommunication Union - Development Sector guidelines. The Ofcom guidance is based on the Online Safety Act 2023 (United Kingdom). That law might not be applicable in Mauritius since the country acceded to independence in 1968. Furthermore, the Ofcom guidance on content was based on the United Kingdom's Children's Register of Risks. It may help parents if there was a Children's Register of Risks for Mauritius.
1. "Cyberharcèlement sur Telegram : une ado de 17 ans se suicide après la diffusion de photos intimes", defimedia.info, 30 October 2025
2. "Suicide filmé en direct et des internautes qui regardent", lemauricien.com, 2 December 2025
3. "Proposal to address the need for child online protection on social media", Ministry of Information Technology, Communication and Innovation, Mauritius, January 2025
4. "Parliamentary Debates", National Assembly, November 2025
5. "Telecommunication Directive 4 of 2025", Information and Communication Technologies Authority
6. "my.t Child Online Protect - my.t mobile", myt.mu
7. "kids pack", emtel.com
8. "CHILI Kids plan", chili.mu
9. "Kaspersky Safe Kids", www.kaspersky.co.za
