Age Without Nuance: Why India’s Approach to Banning Children from Social Media Needs a Rethink
By Shatakshi Shekhar
India risks mistaking locked doors for safe homes. In the name of protecting children online, regulators are preparing to restrict the child rather than the platforms that imperil them. Karnataka has proposed a ban for under‑sixteens, Andhra Pradesh for under‑thirteens, and the Centre is weighing a calibrated, age‑tiered framework. Each rests on the flawed premise that distance from a platform equals safety. A framework holding platforms liable for design choices that make their products compulsive will protect children far more effectively than one demanding age verification alone. The first tackles the structural problem; the second is cosmetic.
Evidence already shows the futility of verification‑first regulation. Australia’s ban on social media for under‑sixteens in December 2025 has proved a cautionary tale: seventy per cent of those barred remain active, VPN use has risen 170 per cent, and many migrated not to safety but to unregulated platforms. The United Kingdom’s gentler regime fares little better: thirty‑two per cent of children circumvent age checks, a quarter with parental help. A law reliant on parental enforcement misreads the household, where parents are often accomplices in subverting it.
Italy and Brazil illustrate the real choice ahead. Italy’s Senate has recognised that corporate architecture, not the child, is the problem; its bill compels platforms to abandon default profiling and demystify algorithms. As one Senator noted, algorithmic curation engineers attention by corporate choice, not technical necessity. Brazil conversely mandates that every user under sixteen link their account to a verified guardian, betting that identity tethered to an accountable adult is the durable foundation of protection. India’s legislation will lean toward one of these poles, and Parliament’s monsoon session must decide which.
Courts have begun to recognise the stakes. In March 2026, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and Google liable for intentionally designing platforms that harmed a young user’s mental health, settling that such trauma is engineered, not incidental. The Madras High Court, hearing a related public interest matter, observed that age‑based restrictions would merely push advertisers toward gaming, connected television, and influencer content. Serious intervention reshapes the commercial ecosystem; it does not merely tweak a child’s account settings.
A blanket ban also carries collateral costs. Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution protects the right to receive information. Stripping access to digital platforms hampers this fundamental right. Moreover, a law drawing no distinction between a child of nine and an adolescent of sixteen struggles against the proportionality standard of the right‑to‑privacy judgment, and contradicts India’s own Juvenile Justice Act and Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, which recognise calibrated protection by developmental stage.
Finally, the techno‑utopian delusion that verification systems can save us must be punctured. Deep packet inspection misflags legitimate traffic, hardware attestation disadvantages older devices, and Indian children typically access the internet through shared parental or sibling devices. Every OTP or biometric lock authenticates the adult, not the child. Greece’s Kids Wallet, anchored to state credentials, offers a pragmatic middle path that India’s DigiLocker could plausibly support, deterring casual circumvention without conscripting platforms into identity repositories. Yet the shared‑device problem remains one only households can resolve.
A graded law remains New Delhi’s correct instinct, but its foundation is paramount. Verification‑first invites Australia’s slow‑motion catastrophe. A graded law anchored in platform liability offers India the chance to succeed where others have floundered. We must regulate the algorithm, not the child. To legislate otherwise would be to ignore the evidence already illuminating the path forward.
Shatakshi Shekhar leads the Product Policy & Government Affairs team at Sakura Law Chambers and holds a Masters in International Affairs from, Columbia University.
