Maldives

National jurisdiction · as of 2026-09-07

Maldives has no adult-content age-verification law, social-media minor-access restriction, app-store age-verification requirement, or age-appropriate design code. The Broadcasting Act (Law No. 16/2010) was substantially amended, and the Maldives Broadcasting Commission it created was reconstituted as the Maldives Media and Broadcasting Commission, by the Maldives Media and Broadcasting Regulation Act (Law No. 16/2025), ratified 18 September 2025.

Under the amended Broadcasting Act's Code of Practice, a licensed broadcaster must classify programs and films according to the recommended age and protect the rights and dignity of children, and content depicting a sexual act or a sexual organ may not be aired at all, but these are broadcast content-standards and classification duties addressed to a licensed broadcaster, not an age-verification or access-gating duty triggered by a viewer's age, and neither the Act nor its Code of Practice reaches a social-media platform, an app store, or an on-demand or online service.

The Child Rights Protection Act (Law No. 19/2019), art. 33(b), bars publishing, in any media, a name, address, place-of-education information, any other information that could directly or indirectly identify a child, or a child's photograph, where the child is a suspect, a victim of crime, or otherwise in need of care or protection, a media-confidentiality protection for at-risk children rather than an age-verification or age-gating duty.