India Must Put Guardrails On Growing Up Online

The question of whether social media should be restricted for youngsters is no longer theoretical. It has moved from parenting debates and school corridors into the heart of public policy. Governments across continents are legislating age thresholds, tightening platform accountability and experimenting with verification regimes. A societal design challenge can’t hide behind the cover of individual choice.

The Global Social Media Shift

India cannot afford to remain a bystander in this shift. For a country positioning itself as a digital superpower, early technological fluency is often seen as an unqualified advantage. Social media, in its most optimistic version, democratises voice, enables peer learning, fuels creator entrepreneurship and connects young Indians to global culture. Many teenagers today acquire skills, confidence and even livelihoods through digital platforms.

But, public policy ought not to be written around best case users. It must be calibrated around population scale risk. The risks are self evident and real. The consequences of unregulated exposure are now too visible to ignore.

Adolescence is not merely a biological phase. It is a neurological construction zone. Impulse control, emotional regulation, self image formation and social comparison thresholds are all still developing at this stage. Into this fragile architecture has entered an industrial ecosystem engineered for compulsive engagement with infinite scroll, algorithmic amplification, validation loops and behavioural nudging designed to maximise time spent. It’s called ‘surveillance capitalism’ for a reason after all.

The collision was therefore inevitable. Rising anxiety, sleep disruption, body-image distress, cyberbullying, exposure to pornography, predatory contact and shrinking attention spans are recurring patterns across geographies. Even where causal science remains contested, behavioural signals are overwhelming enough to justify precaution.

Public health actions in history offer perspective here. Regulation of tobacco, junk food advertising to children, access to alcohol and even seat-belt mandates did not wait for perfect academic consensus. Policy must move on directional risk. Childhood protection has always operated on the principle that prevention is wiser than npost facto correction.

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India’s case for intervention is even stronger because of our scale and speed.

We have one of the world’s largest youth populations online with hundreds of millions of minors, many of them first-generation internet users accessing the web primarily through personal smartphones. Cheap data and ubiquitous connectivity have leapfrogged parental literacy, school preparedness and regulatory design.

What Western societies ingested over two decades, India is stuffing instantaneously.

In many households, the smartphone is not a supervised device but a private portal. Algorithmic exposure is occurring without cultural buffering, without digital literacy and often without language filters. For millions of young users, social media is not an extension of life. It is the environment in which identity itself is being constructed. That demands guardrails.

Critics of restriction raise predictable objections

The first is enforcement. Teenagers, they argue, will bypass age gates, create shadow accounts or migrate to alternative platforms. This is almost certainly true but it is not a policy veto.

Underage drinking persists despite legal age limits. Academic cheating survives invigilation. Piracy exists despite copyright law. Imperfect enforcement has never been grounds for regulatory abdication. The goal of social policy is harm reduction at scale, not behavioural perfection at the margins.

A second objection points to research ambiguity. Studies show correlation, not always causation, between social media use and mental health decline. But this argument misreads the breadth of concern. The risk landscape extends beyond depression metrics into sleep erosion, sexual content exposure, predation, misinformation, radicalisation and attention fragmentation. Even modest correlations, when applied to hundreds of millions of developing minds, acquire civilisational significance. We cannot afford to wait and see.