While Congress debates, school children die: the case for a Presidential summit

While Congress debates, school children die: the case for a Presidential summit The recent shooting rampages involving minors in Tacloban and Zamboanga are not isolated tragedies. They are warning signals. And neither the Senate nor the House of Representatives have answers for them today. Other countries did not wait for a perfect solution. Australia drew a hard line: no one under 16 may hold a social media account, no parental-consent workaround, and platforms face fines of up to A$49.5 million (P2B) if they fail to enforce it. The European Union’s Digital Services Act requires big platforms to proactively police harmful content or face real financial penalties. Even China, for very different reasons, imposes hard usage caps and curfews on minors by law. France, the UK, and some US states have moved toward binding age-verification rules, however imperfectly enforced. The Philippines has none of this — no minimum-age law, no mandate forcing Meta (Facebook-Instagram ) ,Google (YouTube) ,TikTok (Byte dance) platforms to police their own algorithms, no legal teeth for the NTC or DICT to demand action instead of merely requesting it. Our default response to online harm for years has been to go after the individual poster — the “bad actor” who uploaded a video or sent a threat. The Cybercrime Prevention Act, Republic Act 10175, was crafted for that world. It wasn’t built for a world where a recommendation algorithm owned by global tech companies actively pushes violent or extremist content to a child because that content keeps the child watching. Classrooms are governed by the Anti-Bullying Act. The Anti-Photo and Video Voyeurism Act covers only one narrow type of abuse. No law answers the question that matters most today: who is to blame when an online platform’s own design radicalizes, isolates, or endangers a child? Right now, the answer is no one. Not the platform. Not the engineers who built the algorithm. Not the global tech companies profiting from every extra minute a child spends scrolling. This crisis has outgrown the pace of ordinary legislation, and it should not wait for the next Congress. The President must now convene an emergency national summit — bringing the Senate and House leadership, the NTC, the DICT, the Department of Education, child psychologists, parent groups, and, yes, representatives from Meta, Google, and TikTok, into the same room, with a mandate to produce a concrete legislative timeline within weeks, not years. A summit alone changes nothing if it produces only statements of concern. Its purpose must be narrow and binding: fast-track a bill, assign accountability to specific agencies, and set a public deadline Congress cannot quietly let lapse the way similar bills have lapsed before. Out of that summit must come five commitments: First, a national law with giving “real enforcement power” to impose meaningful fines on Meta, Google, TikTok and local tech companies. . Second, mandatory platform-side measures such as working age verification and safer default settings for minors’ accounts. Third- narrow targeted telecom-level blocking of clearly illegal content — not app-wide bans that punish everyone and get bypassed with a VPN anyway. Fourth, Legal recognition and support for device-level parental controls which is the layer closest to the child. And lastly- Funded, mandatory digital literacy programs in schools and communities because no filter replaces an informed parent and child. None of these five actions can become effective alone. A telecom blocklist without a legal mandate is a courtesy platforms can ignore. A parental control app without supporting legislation is just a suggestion. Binding domestic legislation comes first — everything else follows. A child-safety bill left un-refiled every Congress is a choice, not a fluke. Tacloban and Zamboanga are not arguments for another hearing. They are arguments for a summit, a bill, a vote, and a signature — and every month without one is a month too late. This gap matters because voluntary compliance is not child-safety policy. Meta (Facebook) , Google and TikTok platforms calibrate their protections to wherever legal and financial risk is greatest. Australia gets an age ban because Australian law demanded one. The EU gets proactive policing because non-compliance there is costly. Today, our country has nothing binding, nothing enforceable legally. The fact that Congress has yet to pass a law making equal protection of our own children mandatory making them less protected than their Australian or European counterparts. Clearly, our senators and congressmen are big failures, and this is why a presidential summit is ultra-necessary. The ineptitude of Congress has left our own children exposed to systems explicitly engineered globally. The question is why there is still no law at all. Affidavits lie, but bank records do not Orly Guteza spent a year as the human face of the flood-control corruption scandal, testifying he personally delivered suitcases of “basura” to then-Speaker Martin Romualdez. Now he says none of it was true — that Sen. Rodante Marcoleta and former Rep. Mike Defensor scripted his testimony in a Pasay restaurant the night before he took the stand, promising him P150 million and school scholarships for his silence-turned-lies. Every institution has responded by picking a side instead of demanding proof. The Ombudsman insists it has 28 other witnesses, as if that answers whether Guteza’s original testimony — the one it built a supplemental plunder complaint on — was ever true. Romualdez’s camp has countered with 25 sworn statements of its own denying any deliveries happened. Sen. Panfilo Lacson now says Marcoleta and Defensor could face charges for subornation of perjury. Meanwhile, the notarizing lawyer whose signature appeared on Guteza’s original affidavit says it was forged — a red flag that predates the recantation entirely. None of all these is evidence. They are competing sets of interested parties trading affidavits like ammunition, while the public is left guessing who is lying this week. The thesis is simple: a case built on a witness’s word alone was never a case — it was a bet. Words can be coached, bought, or recanted. Bank transfers, procurement records, CCTV footage, phone metadata, and notarial registers cannot. The Ombudsman must stop nit-picking Guteza’s credibility and start subpoenaing what cannot be rehearsed: the money trail, the digital trail, the paper trail. Charge whoever fabricated evidence — on either side whether Marcoleta-Defensor or Romualdez. Our people don’t need another witness to believe. They need proof that doesn’t change its story depending on who’s asking.