At the hackathons and AI meetups I’ve been attending, the twenty-year-olds are far ahead of founders in their forties. Ask them where they learned AI, and the answer is YouTube and social media, tinkering around as teenagers: going down rabbit holes, watching videos, and trying out links shared by friends. Many successful startup founders grew up gaming, and still game.This week, the Centre told the Supreme Court that it was planning a legal bar on social media accounts for those under 18. A day later, it denied the move, which is sometimes a sign that these restrictions are being planned. The govt has been flirting with the idea, and state govts including Karnataka, Telangana, Goa, and Rajasthan have considered or announced plans for such regulation. A walled-off social media for everyone under 18 will be the biggest self-goal in the history of India’s internet.I understand the concern: children are spending enormous amounts of time on platforms designed to keep users hooked, serve up dopamine hits and expose them to strangers. They target content that, at an impressionable age, feeds bias and insecurity.The problem is not that children are online but how the platforms function. A ban solves the wrong problem: it restricts access instead of forcing platforms to improve. It is the online equivalent of a govt telling people not to step out of their homes instead of making the city safer — the state passing its burden on to citizens, the way we already compensate privately for failures in security, water and clean air.We need to solve for grooming, child sexual abuse material, cyberbullying, and the systems that allow strangers to contact children on these platforms. These harms persist because platforms struggle to enforce community guidelines at planet scale. What can be done? We need better parental controls, and define what safe design defaults look like. Limit default autoplay, endless feeds and aggressive notifications. Set safer defaults for discoverability, direct messaging and targeted advertising, especially for younger users. The Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act already restricts targeted advertising to children.If the concern is addictive design, we need to regulate it and ask what the feeds optimise for. We know platforms can change their algorithms when commercial incentives require it. Regulation should be that incentive.A ban is the populist thing to do. Govts avoid the hard and nuanced decisions, and use blunt instruments instead of architecting safety in consultation with platforms and civil society, and addressing harms proportionately.A single threshold at 18 ignores how agency and risk change through adolescence. A minor at 13, 16 or 18 years does not have identical needs, independence and ability to manage online risk. We need to enable agency gradually and not flip a switch on someone’s 18th birthday. This is a hard problem because any graded approach needs a way of roughly knowing how old a user is. I would start with safe design by default, instead of forcing facial verification, Aadhaar or DigiLocker for every Internet user. That is disproportionate surveillance and a violation of users’ privacy and the right to anonymity. This implementation would only lead to the expansion of the govt’s infrastructure for surveillance, and expand to gaming and AI, and maybe even app stores and devices. Faced with verification mandates from other govts, Meta and Snap have lobbied globally to shift the verification burden to app stores. That would be neither necessary nor proportionate.A ban will not eliminate access. As Australia has shown, restricted under-16s learnt how to use VPNs. In India, we already use borrowed accounts on shared devices. The use of apps with less parental visibility, and of platforms with fewer restrictions or no safety measures at all, will increase. I would probably build my own messaging and social media app with AI and invite others to join it. The argument made in court is that children cannot validly consent to terms of service, since contract law sets the age of majority at 18. This is fine as a doctrine, but the terms of service are not a satisfactory basis for deciding whether a young person may communicate, learn, create or participate in public life online. These platforms carry speech, and children have a right to expression and information too. We need our schools to enable a better understanding of the harms of being online among children.As a parent, I want online spaces to be safer, but I don’t want safety to become a ruse for censorship and surveillance. Lastly, the decision on how my child, who is three and a half and has rarely been given a device, learns how to use the internet has to be mine, and should remain mine.Pahwa is the founder of MediaNama
Disclaimer: Views expressed above are the author’s own.
