Its minister, Annuar Musa, said existing laws cannot be applied to those providing over-the-top (OTT) streaming services as well as companies operating overseas.

“This is a challenge not only in Malaysia but in a majority of countries, and we need to find suitable ways to do it,” he said during the question-and-answer session.

Annuar was replying to Wan Hassan Mohd Ramli (PN-Dungun), who asked what the government had done to curb lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender shows on Netflix.

Wan Hassan pointed out that online streaming did not exist when the Communications and Multimedia Act 1998 was first introduced.

So, he said, there was a need for the ministry to review OTT services, and asked if the government had plans to control them.

Annuar said as of now, the ministry could only carry out advocacy programmes to educate people to make more informed decisions on the content they subscribed to.

“We have online gaming sites and various channels (that produce content) that go against the country’s culture and sensitivities of the people,” he said.

He said the challenge for the authorities was that Malaysian laws did not apply to those operating overseas.

However, in cases where a show was deemed “extremely inappropriate”, his ministry would engage the service providers with the aim of getting them to review the airing of the content in Malaysia.

Annuar said Netflix had recommended suitable ages for all its content and even parental controls with passwords to prevent children from viewing shows meant for adults.

“This requires self-monitoring (by parents),” he said.

On a separate topic, he said that as of September, more than 4,000 pornography sites had been banned in Malaysia.