[Courting Controversy] Down the rabbit hole: Policing Wonderland for kids

Lewis Carroll gave us the phrase "down the rabbit hole" in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, long before anyone had even heard of the term algorithm. And yet, today, it is hard to think of a better description for what a YouTube autoplay queue or an Instagram Reels feed can do to a 10-year-old’s fantasy on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

Alice, at least, could climb her way out of the rabbit hole. Today’s metaphorical wonderland, that is online social media platforms, are specifically engineered to keep users engaged for hours making sure that no one finds a way out. It is this engineered descent that lies behind the familiar observation that the technology which connects us also controls us.  

A recent writ petition filed before the Delhi High Court concerning the impact of social media usage on children brought this to the fore. The writ filed against the Union of India sought sweeping relief in the form of age-appropriate restrictions on social media access for children, viable age-verification mechanisms modelled on the Digi Yatra system, curfews on teenage platform use, and stricter enforcement of existing legislation, including the Information Technology Act, 2000 and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023.

A Division Bench of the Delhi High Court disposed of the petition without granting the substantive relief sought. The Court’s reasoning was correctly based on the issue of restricting children’s social media usage to be one of governmental policy and hence for the Union government to consider. A similar order had also been passed by the Supreme Court last year. Such an outcome was warranted. Courts are not the appropriate forum to legislate technical standards for age verification or draw lines between permissible and harmful content at scale. Such matters of policy are better addressed by the legislature and the executive, informed by expert opinion and stakeholder consultation. 

In formulating policy, India now has the advantage of seeing how comparable jurisdictions have fared thus far. A comparison across these jurisdictions reveals two broad policy routes: access-based restrictions, where the government imposes an outright ban on social media use below a certain age, or platform-based compliance, where the burden shifts to social media companies to ensure their algorithms do not cause harm to children.

An example of the former approach is Australia, which became the first country to legislate an outright social media ban for children under the age of 16 in December 2025 across 10 major platforms. The initial enforcement results looked significant on paper and many accounts were deactivated within weeks. Yet, in the following months, the government’s online safety regulator found that approximately 81.5% of the children aged between 10 to 15 remained active social media users. The mechanism of evasion included VPNs, fake accounts and falsified age-verification inputs. In short, Australia’s Alice simply found another rabbit hole.

The European Union has taken a materially different approach by way of guidelines issued under Article 28(1) of Regulation (EU) 2022/2065, which obligate platforms to embed age-appropriate design into their products such that the platforms are aligned with the developmental, cognitive and emotional needs of minors, restrict targeted advertising towards minors’ accounts and submit to regulatory audit of recommender algorithms. This model treats compulsive engagement and algorithmic amplification as the primary harm, shifting the compliance burden onto platforms, rather than having the State chase down individual accounts. This formulation appears more durable because it does not depend entirely on verifying a user’s precise age at the point of access and imposes a positive obligation on social media platforms to ensure the safety of children. It is harder to circumvent through simple credential manipulation.

India's potential guidelines in this regard must reckon with three considerations. First, any framework premised on age verification must confront the fact that no jurisdiction has yet solved this problem durably, given how fluidly children’s account ownership and access channels shift. Second, regulating platform design and algorithmic amplification by platforms may prove more resilient than access restriction alone, since design-level obligations are harder to circumvent than credential-based one-time gateways. Third, enforceability demands an institutional mechanism with audit and penalty powers and the government may consider establishing an independent regulator such as Ofcom in the United Kingdom. 

Alice, in the end, had the good fortune of a story that let her wake up. The children scrolling through today’s Wonderland deserve no less. And with the government now being asked, for the second time, to weigh in, that better ending may not be far away.

Nakul Dewan is a Senior Advocate and King’s Counsel.