The 2025 Netflix series Adolescence, about a schoolboy influenced by social media content who murders his classmate, is a red flag for parents. The internet and particularly social media can be a cesspool of harmful content and toxic ideologies that minors need protection against.
The principle of inter-generational equity posits that the current generation has a responsibility to protect the well-being of future generations. While the principle is usually invoked in the context of the right to a healthy and sustainable environment, it is capacious enough to embrace the right to an environment conducive to the mental and emotional health of children.
It is a truth now universally acknowledged that unchecked access to social media adversely impacts the health and well-being of children.
Australia became the first country to declare a blanket ban on social media use for children below the age of 16, through the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024. The ban will become effective from December 2025.
The announcement was met with mixed responses the world over. Is the ban far too sweeping and disproportionate? While trying to address the challenges of social media use, does the ban altogether fail to acknowledge some benefits of growing up in the age of social media? It is, after all, social media that rescued us from social and informational isolation during the pandemic. In societies where the size of families is shrinking rapidly, social media is an avenue to much-needed social engagement, particularly for young people, and an antidote to loneliness.
For girls cloistered by orthodox societies, digital platforms often serve as their only real window to the outside world. For children who are sexual minorities, social media offers the shield of anonymity that facilitates access to health information and companionship. The benefits of social media are hard to ignore and, therefore, a blanket ban may amount to throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Having said that, the enormous adverse impact of social media on the right to grow up in a healthy environment stares us in the face. In recent years, studies show that there has been a manifold rise in depression, self-harm and suicide ideation among teenagers worldwide. This has prompted schools in the United States of America to file lawsuits against large tech companies, seeking staggering damages from the tech platforms for causing a mental health crisis among children. No longer can tech platforms hide behind the shield of being neutral highways of information. They are themselves products, deliberately designed to grab and sustain the attention of vulnerable children to a point of addiction. The plaintiffs in these lawsuits accuse the tech platforms of being a ‘public nuisance’ leading to depression, behavioural disorders such as anxiety, disordered eating patterns and cyber bullying, making it much harder to educate children. According to them, there is a direct interference with the ability of schools to carry out their educational mission.
The plaintiffs allege that "the defendants have successfully exploited the vulnerable brains of youth, hooking tens of millions of students across the country into positive feedback loops of excessive use and abuse of the defendants’ social media platforms."
This has compelled schools to take steps such as training teachers especially to identify and address symptoms of mental health decline, hiring trained personnel and raising additional resources to warn students about the dangers of social media. Social media has drawn children away from healthy social engagement in the real world leading them to spend less time on sports and physical activity with obvious effects on their physical, mental and emotional health. Even among adults, social media has led to drastically shortened attention spans and lack of concentration, quite apart from projecting distorted realities and lowering individual self-esteem. The unhindered access to pornography, the proliferation of stalking, sexting and grooming have led to crimes both online and offline.
Children are precious and constitute our future generation of citizens. Their right to a meaningful education, a healthful environment and a robust childhood - rights under Articles 21 and 21A of the Constitution - can brook no compromise. The question is, whether we are doing enough to arrest the ill-effects of social media. Should the law impose a blanket ban like the one in Australia or should parents be left to decide what their children have access to? Would the State turn into a super-censor by imposing bans and restrictions that decide what is good for you and your children? Leaving the decision entirely to parents may be overestimating the extent and practicality of parental supervision in current times.
The challenges are reaching looming proportions, but the response of regulators has been slow and inadequate. All this, while tech giants trade on human attention with impunity and laugh all the way to the bank. It is time to put the onus on the tech companies to find solutions to the challenges they have created.
The immunity that was once available to intermediaries under the Information Technology Act, 2000 is now significantly diluted. No longer can social media intermediaries bask in the comfort of safe harbour provisions. The draft Digital Personal Data Protection Rules released in early 2025 seek to impose an age verification requirement. But it is premised, rather unrealistically, on children voluntarily declaring themselves to be underage and also presumes that parents enjoy a higher degree of digital literacy than their children. The verification system is flawed and can be easily circumvented by using VPNs, borrowing or purchasing verified adult accounts, or manipulating AI-based systems such as facial recognition tools.
Notably, in 2022, the French Commission on Information Technology and Liberties (CNIL) found that none of the currently available age verification methods satisfactorily ensure reliable verification, complete population coverage and respect for user privacy, highlighting the urgent need to reassess the efficacy and risks of such approaches. These realities underscore the urgent need for a more nuanced, rights-respecting and enforceable approach to online child safety.
Madhavi Divan is a Senior Advocate and the author of "Facets of Media Law".