three sisters, aged 12, 14 and 16, ended their lives in Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, leaving behind their family and a country struggling to comprehend the horror. Preliminary police reports suggest it to be a case of screen addiction and parental conflict. Politicians, parents and pundits have united in demanding swift action. The sentiment is understandable. When a child dies, we want someone to blame and, sometimes, something to ban. But beneath the fury lies a dangerous impulse: to solve a complex problem with a blunt instrument that absolves platforms of accountability while stripping young people of their digital rights.
There is no room for speculation when it comes to the evidence that excessive use of social media can harm adolescents’ mental health. While a few outliers exist in scholarly literature, many meta-analyses and systematic reviews identify small but consistent associations between heavy social media use and increased anxiety, depressive symptoms, self-harm and body image dissatisfaction among teenagers, particularly girls. While most of these studies have not been conducted in India, they still serve as a note of caution on the effects of social media use.
Australia has a targeted ban, who many in India now point to as a template. In 2024, Australia passed a law prohibiting anyone under the age of 16 from holding accounts on 10 major platforms, including Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat and X, which is enforced through mandatory age verification and backed by heavy fines. The law came into force on December 10, 2025, making Australia the first country to truly pull the plug on under-16 social media accounts.
Spain pledged to “protect them from the digital Wild West” and hold executives criminally liable for algorithmic amplification of hate on February 3, 2026, when it announced plans to ban social media for minors. Over fifty years ago, Stanley Cohen demonstrated that when society fails to resolve complex social issues, it is branded a “folk devil” and subjected to disproportionate, symbolic repression. For India duplicating the approach would be disastrous for four distinct reasons.
First, bans are technically porous and difficult to implement even if outsourced to social media companies themselves. Adolescents are often more digitally literate than the legislators regulating them. As seen in jurisdictions with strict age-gating, bans invariably trigger a mass migration to Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) or, worse, push young users from regulated platforms such as Instagram to encrypted, unmoderated corners of the dark web where grooming and extremism thrive unchecked. If identity verification is included in some forms of enforcement, there may be a risk that every social media account is linked to a government ID, resulting in a framework for mass surveillance. Second, a blanket ban ignores the complexity of adolescent development. Social media is also a lifeline, as noted by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and various child rights organizations. For rural adolescents, urban slum dwellers, queer and differently-abled teens seeking peer support, these platforms are often their only window to a community where they feel seen.
Third, this approach suffers from a severe democratic deficit. India has a long tradition of developing youth policy without ever consulting them. Fourth, and most importantly, a social media ban will certainly calcify the gendered social inequalities that will prevent girls from lower income households, particularly young girls, from using the Internet for their social mobility and charting their future.
Only 33.3% of women in India, compared to 57.1% of men, reported ever using the Internet, according to the National Sample Survey. In patriarchal settings, where female Internet access is already viewed with suspicion, a government mandate to “police” age is likely to result in families just confiscating the device entirely from young girls.
There are alternatives. First, the government must abandon its addiction to censorship. We urgently need a sophisticated menu of legislative tools that include a robust digital competition law and legally enforceable “duty of care” obligations towards minors, with provisions for monetary penalties. Crucially, these must be enforced by an independent, expert regulator, not by the bureaucracy.
Second, India needs serious public funding for surveys and longitudinal research on how social media actually shapes children’s well-being locally, across class, gender, caste and region. Young people must be at the centre of this policy process. We already know how foolish it is to ignore them. Finally, we should ask why our moral outrage is uniquely limited to social media? Are Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbots and their integration with social media platforms not subject to any of these issues? Early research already links higher AI use in creating a “cognitive debt” that leads to weaker critical thinking. Relatedly, young people are already using generative AI tools for emotional and mental health advice. Recent reporting and litigation have highlighted serious child-safety failures in conversational AI systems, including sexualised interactions with minors and alleged links to self-harm and suicide. If the concern is about harm to children, regulation has to be consistent and our failure to consider AI regulation must be considered. Media expert Neil Postman once said, “I am not pro, or anti, technology. That would be stupid. For that would be like being pro, or anti, food.”
The lesson for us as adults is to provide a healthy media ecology to our children rather than taking social media completely off the table. This is tougher work than a ban. But it requires us to confront our dissonance on the doctrine of tech-driven innovation that is exempt from regulation, where on one day we demonise social media and on another, worship AI. A social media ban ignores complex realities when what is needed instead is a healthy media ecology.
