Should children be barred from social media?

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Amanda, could you tell us about the ongoing debate in Australia?

Amanda Third: This policy decision has come out of the blue. It is not a debate that we have been having for a long time. Off the back of the pandemic and the large increases in time spent online by children, along with a recognition that some children are exposed to harm via social media, the debate has heated up.

The debate in favour of a ban has largely been driven by parent groups. The government is under pressure to demand that technology platforms step up and assume responsibility for keeping children safe online. However, there is a political dimension to this too: Australia is in the lead up to a federal election (in 2025) and Meta has declared that it will no longer pay money to news agencies in order to distribute news content. So, the government is keen to keep the Murdoch empire happy. The way to do that is to go along with this impetus for a ban.

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While a ban looks seductive, it may not give parents what they are looking for, which is safer spaces for their children and for technology companies to take responsibility. If children are banned from these spaces, companies will have even less of an imperative to design platforms for them and for young people. We need to put more pressure on tech platforms to deliver better spaces for children and young people.

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Aparajita, what are your views on age limits?

Aparajita Bharti: When we talk about enforcing age limits, the devil lies in the details. In India, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, says children can access any platform which collects their personal data only after getting verifiable parental consent. How do we implement this? In Australia, when the Prime Minister says there should be a social media ban until the age of 16, how would such a ban be implemented? It is unclear.

Bans are hard to enforce in a digital environment. Apart from what Amanda said, children are good at circumventing [barriers]. South Korea’s Cinderella Law had banned gaming from midnight to 6:00 a.m. After the law came in, there was identity theft so that children would be able to access the gaming platforms.

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Age limits seem to put the burden of compliance on parents. Is that reasonable?

Aparajita Bharti: You are right. This is specifically amplified in India, where digital literacy is quite low, where there are many different languages, and where platforms don’t always lend themselves the same way in all these languages. There is also a lot of shared device usage. We conducted a survey of 10,000 children in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities and in government schools in Delhi and found out that 80% of children helped their parents navigate online platforms. So, to expect parents to guide children on safe online usage is not sensible. Similarly, if you look at the NSSO (National Sample Survey Office) data, only 40% Indians knew how to copy or move files on a computer (2021). This number may have increased, but if we use ID-based verification, for example, which has been proposed time and again as a means to verify age, it would be hard for people who are less literate to do that. Therefore, we also need to think about what responsibility platforms need to take and what kind of design changes they need to make to ensure the safety of children online.

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Amanda, what is the conversation at home?

Amanda Third: Parents feel overwhelmed by the task of managing their children’s digital engagements and that is made difficult by the fact that we have a highly inflammatory media environment where only the extreme cases of children experiencing significant harm get reported. It is a very one-sided conversation. It does not include the positives that come out of the digital engagements of children and young people. We have some wonderful organisations here generating high-quality online safety materials. But even so, the availability and distribution of those resources pales in comparison with the panic narrative that parents are exposed to. We need to moderate the media debate and make sure that we give parents good, strong advice about the things that they can do to keep their kids safe online, but also on how to maximise the value of being online. Research shows that when a parent is able to support their child to really maximise the benefits of being online, this also works to mitigate the harms.

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Aparajita Bharti: The education system also has a huge role to play, especially in India. On the one hand, we are making our school curricula more and more digital because there is an understanding that this is a skill that is required for a person to be employable. On the other, we are always discussing screen time. So, what are we doing to our education curriculum? What is that fine balance between going tech and also emphasising physical sport, writing, etc.?

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Second, as part of their core curriculum, children should be taught how to be resilient online. We teach our children about good touch, bad touch, and how to be safe in the physical world. But unfortunately, while there have been many scattered initiatives, the core curriculum in India does not include lessons on how to conduct yourself online, on how to know you are in danger, what is unsafe, etc.

Parents share their children’s personal data online at the cost of the privacy of children. How do we tackle this?

Amanda Third: Spot on. Children have been telling us that they perceive double standards in the use of technology. That is, the parents have one set of rules for their children and a different set for themselves. Parenting is about role modelling. The kinds of habits that you demonstrate in front of your child influences them deeply. One of the most powerful things that parents can do is to regulate their own use (of platforms).

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Aparajita Bharti: In India, we have not really had a discussion around law on ‘sharenting’ (the practice of parents publicising a large amount of potentially sensitive content about their children on Internet platforms). But quite a few law-enforcement agencies, such as the Assam Police, have been using their social media to warn parents against ‘sharenting’. Under the data protection law, every citizen has the right to correction and erasure of personal data. It will be interesting to see how children, when they grow up, will use this law to remove certain things that their parents put out when they (the children) were minors without their consent.

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There are a lot of child influencers on social media, who enter into marketing contracts. What is being done to address the issue?

Aparajita Bharti: The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights came out with some guidelines for child and adolescent participation in the entertainment industry in 2023. These require producers to obtain permission from district magistrates before a child can perform in any audio visual content. It is interesting that they don’t put the onus on parents. However, if you look at social media now, certain accounts get flagged because the audience feels that the child is being exploited by their parents to market products. In France, the law says if a child under the age of 16 is an influencer and earns an income, their parents cannot access that income until the child turns 16. We should also consider certain regulations around this in India.

Also read | How can child safety be ensured online?

What are the responsibilities of social media platforms and tech companies in ensuring the safety of children online?

Amanda Third: We have been too focused on protecting children from possible harms and not focused enough on thinking about the kinds of environments in which we would like our children to roam around online. We have a lot of work to do in moving companies and governments away from a compliance mode into a mode of designing optimal environments for children. One of the big upcoming dilemmas is, what are we going to decide is acceptable in terms of age assurance technologies or age verification? What is our threshold of tolerance for identity verification, particularly where that identification requires private companies to collect yet more data about us?

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Aparajita Bharti: The same technology that can be used for harm is also used to keep children safe online. For example, if the child is doing something that indicates that they are close to self-harm, the companies cannot do anything about it without tracking. So, every technology can be used both for good and bad. Therefore, banning something in the digital space is difficult.

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If banning is not the right way to go, what is the way to get platforms to do better? We have models from around the world. The Age-Appropriate Design Code in the U.K., 2020, has had a real impact on platforms. They have made changes, so that children have better default settings when they join the platform and are exposed to minimum risk. A recent study found that platforms such as Meta, Google, TikTok, and Snapchat have made 128 changes related to child safety and privacy. Sadly, we don’t have anything like that in India yet.

There also needs to be more transparency around these design changes. It is not enough for platforms to say we have made design changes; it is also important for platforms to report the changes they see in children’s behaviour after making those changes.

Listen to the conversation in The Hindu Parley podcast