After Reading This Article You Can Solve This UPSC Mains Model Questions:
Discuss the tension between child protection and digital rights in the regulation of social media platforms in India. How can the State ensure a rights-based, child-centric digital governance framework? 250 Words (GS-1, Society)
Context
- The tragic suicide of three sisters in Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, recently has reignited debates on social media’s impact on adolescent mental health. Preliminary investigations point to screen addiction and familial conflicts, prompting calls for outright bans amid global precedents.
- However, such blunt policy measures may inadvertently compromise the digital rights of minors while absolving technology platforms of structural accountability, necessitating a shift toward a healthy media ecology.
Social Media’s Dual-Edged Potential
I. Benefits of Social Media for Children
Social media platforms offer substantial developmental and social advantages, especially in an increasingly digital society, despite legitimate concerns:
- Access to information and learning: Enables exposure to educational content, skill-building resources, and collaborative learning communities, supplementing formal education.
- Creative expression: Provides avenues for artistic, literary, musical, and innovative expression, fostering imagination, confidence, and problem-solving skills.
- Social inclusion and support: Acts as a lifeline for marginalised groups, including LGBTQIA+ youth, children with disabilities, and those in remote or socially restrictive environments.
- Facilitates peer-support networks and shared experiences that may be unavailable offline.
- Digital skills development: Early engagement enhances media literacy, communication competencies, and digital skills essential for future employability.
- Civic and cultural engagement: Encourages participation in social causes, awareness campaigns, and cultural exchange, promoting active digital citizenship.
- Social mobility and gender equity: Social media can expand access to information and opportunities, particularly for girls.
- National Sample Survey data indicate that only 33.3% of women in India have ever used the internet compared to 57.1% of men, highlighting how restrictive measures risk deepening gendered digital divides.
II. Necessity of Banning Social Media Use Among Children
Concerns around banning or restricting social media for children arise from its multi-dimensional impact on health, behaviour, and safety, particularly during formative years:
- Impact on cognitive functioning: Excessive screen exposure is associated with reduced attention span, impaired concentration, and difficulty in learning and information retention, adversely affecting academic performance.
- Mental health vulnerabilities: Prolonged and addictive use has been linked to heightened anxiety, depressive tendencies, low self-esteem, diminished emotional self-regulation, and a rise in attention-related disorders such as ADHD.
- Adverse physical health outcomes: Repeated exposure to curated content encourages sedentary lifestyles, disordered eating patterns, and unrealistic body image standards, contributing to sleep disturbances, obesity, and related health concerns.
- Disruption of social development: Over-reliance on virtual interactions can reduce face-to-face communication, leading to social withdrawal, strained family relationships, and difficulties in emotional regulation.
- Online safety and child protection risks: Children are increasingly vulnerable to cyberbullying, online harassment, sexual exploitation, and exposure to age-inappropriate or harmful content.
- Influence of hazardous viral trends: The rapid spread of risky online challenges—such as breath-holding or delinquent behaviour trends—poses risks of physical harm, legal consequences, and disciplinary action among minors.
- Inadequate parental supervision: In urban and dual-income households, limited parental oversight has contributed to unregulated screen time, often reflected in the phenomenon of excessive device-dependent childhood.
- Algorithm-driven overuse: Engagement-maximising algorithms personalise content to prolong usage, making it difficult for children to disengage and increasing the risk of addictive behaviour.
Key Challenges Linked to Banning Social Media for Children
Drawing on Stanley Cohen’s concept of moral panic, such prohibitionist responses risk framing digital platforms as “folk devils”—creating an illusion of control while diverting attention from structural gaps in child mental-health governance and digital regulation. These challenges manifest across multiple dimensions:
- Concerns over age verification and privacy: The absence of credible age-verification systems allows underage users to evade restrictions using VPNs and other workarounds. Measures such as government ID linkage, biometric verification, or age-estimation tools pose significant privacy and data-security risks.
- Possibility of excessive regulation: Blanket restrictions may inadvertently include gaming and communication platforms like Roblox and Discord, leading to unnecessary curbs on legitimate users.
- Movement to unsafe online spaces: Since bans are difficult to enforce, children may migrate to unregulated and encrypted platforms, including the Dark Web, increasing exposure to harm.
- Rights-related concerns and exclusion: Prohibitions can undermine freedom of expression and access to information, disproportionately affecting vulnerable communities, especially LGBTQIA+ youth who rely on online support networks.
- Barriers to digital skill building: Limiting access also curtails creative engagement, educational collaboration, and interest-based learning, weakening the development of essential digital skills.
Why a Blanket Ban Will Not Work in India
Copy-pasting foreign bans ignores India’s unique socio-technical landscape, yielding democratic deficits and unintended harms.
- Technical Porosity: India’s vast digital population makes enforcement impractical.
- Diversity of Contexts: One-size-fits-all policies ignore variations across class, caste, gender, and region.
- Democratic Deficit: Policies are often framed without consulting children, disregarding their agency.
- Institutional Capacity Constraints: Regulatory institutions lack technical expertise to monitor compliance effectively.
- Risk of State Overreach: Linking social media access to identity verification may erode civil liberties.
India’s Initiatives to Protect Children on Online Platforms
India has enacted a multi-layered framework emphasizing prevention, consent, and enforcement.
- Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023: Mandates verifiable parental consent for processing data of those under 18, addressing consent gating flaws.
- Section 67B, IT Act, 2000: Imposes stringent penalties for child sexual abuse material (CSAM) publication, transmission, or viewing.
- National Action Plan for Children, 2016: Targets prevention of crimes, prioritizing sexual offenses.
- Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, 2012: Safeguards children under 18 from exploitation, ensuring child-centric judicial processes.
- National Commission of Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) Mechanisms: Operates online complaint systems for swift redressal.
- Ratification of UNCRC {UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC)} 1990: Promotes protections for online/offline child rights violations.
Global Steps taken to Protect children from Social Media
- Australia: Australia enacted a law that prohibits anyone under 16 from holding accounts on 10 major platforms—including Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat, and X—enforced through mandatory age verification and fines of up to 50 million Australian dollars, making Australia the first country to effectively ban under‑16 social media accounts.
- Germany and France: Raised age needed for parental consent to open an account.
- United States: Kids Online Safety Act provides protections for children online related to privacy and mental health concerns.
- U.K.: Online Safety Act, 2023 sets tougher standards for social media platforms like facebook- including appropriate age restrictions.
- Netherlands and South Korea: Restricted use of cell-phones in classrooms.
Way Forward
A nuanced, child-centric strategy must prioritise a healthy media ecology over blanket bans, integrating multiple stakeholders to create sustainable and rights-respecting safeguards.
- Child-Centric Digital Governance: Promote age-appropriate design, privacy-by-default, and algorithmic accountability through coordinated action by the State, platforms, and civil society; draw lessons from the UK’s Age-Appropriate Design Code.
- Strengthen Redressal Mechanisms: Enhance Child Helpline 1098, appoint and train cyber nodal officers, and expand rapid-response tools such as POCSO e-Box panic buttons for online abuse reporting.
- Improving Digital Skills and Education: Institutionalise digital literacy, responsible online behaviour, and self-regulation through school-based initiatives; replicate Kerala’s Digital De-Addiction (D-DAD) centres for children facing screen dependency.
- Awareness Campaigns: Leverage national programmes like NIPUN Bharat and Digital India to empower communities, parents, and educators to recognise and mitigate online risks.
- Parental Involvement and Control: Encourage joint parent-child accounts, robust privacy settings, and screen-time management tools such as Google Family Link.
- Tech Company Accountability: Enforce a duty of care on platforms, strengthen digital competition laws, and ensure oversight by an independent regulator beyond MeitY; platforms like Meta already prescribe 13+ age thresholds.
Conclusion
Bans provide illusory control, eroding digital rights while ignoring social media’s dual-edged potential. True protection demands robust regulation, local research, youth-inclusive policymaking, and equitable access—fostering resilience in a tech-driven world. This balanced ecology aligns with India’s constitutional ethos of empowering the young without compromising freedoms.
