OPINION: The World Is Drawing a Line. India Needs to Draw One Too

On Wednesday, Canada tabled Bill C-34 - the Safe Social Media Act - becoming the latest country to say, plainly and without apology, that social media is not safe for children under 16. Companies that fail to block underage users will face fines of up to 3% of global revenue, or C$10 million - whichever is higher. The message to platforms is unmistakeable: protect children or pay for it.

Canada joins Australia, which enacted the world's first full ban in December 2025, along with Malaysia, Indonesia, and a growing roll call of nations that are no longer willing to treat childhood as an algorithm's playground. The question India now needs to answer is not whether it should follow - but how quickly it can.

A Generation Growing Up on Scroll

Gen Alpha - children born after 2010 - is the first generation to grow up entirely inside the smartphone era. Globally, over half of them are on social media before they turn 12. In India, the numbers are even more striking. Indian teenagers aged 13-18 spend over 4.5 hours daily on screens - a 30% jump since 2023. India has 750 million smartphones in circulation and a billion internet users. For Meta alone, India is its single largest market by users across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

This is not a small country with a contained problem. This is the world's most populous nation, with hundreds of millions of minors feeding one of the most profitable attention economies ever built.

What Is Social Media Doing to Indian Children?

The harms are not theoretical. Psychiatrists at hospitals across Bengaluru and Hyderabad describe the same pattern: children whose self-worth has become inseparable from likes and comments. The brain's decision-making and emotional regulation centres are not fully formed until the mid-twenties. Handing a developing mind an infinite scroll of peer comparison, curated perfection, and algorithmically amplified outrage is, as one Canadian minister put it, "designed to capture attention" - and it is working, at scale, on children who have no cognitive armour against it.

Cyberbullying is no longer an edge-case horror story. It is routine. Misinformation travels faster on platforms optimised for engagement than on any previous media. And the newest crisis - AI-generated deepfakes, many of them targeting girls - is something no child should encounter without the protection of a mature digital sensibility that simply cannot exist at age 11 or 13.

India Has Already Started - But Only in Patches

The good news is that India is not starting from zero. In March 2026, Karnataka became the first Indian state to announce a social media ban for children under 16, with Chief Minister Siddaramaiah framing it as part of a broader education reform programme. Andhra Pradesh followed with a ban for under-13s. India's chief economic adviser had, in January, already described social media platforms as "predatory" in their design for young users.

But patchwork state action is not policy. Karnataka can announce the ban; it cannot compel Meta, Google, or ByteDance to enforce it. A 15-year-old in Bengaluru faces the same algorithmic machine as a 15-year-old in Lucknow or Guwahati - and without a national law, the machine doesn't care about state budgets.

The Case for a National Safeguard

India has the architecture for this conversation. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 already mandates verifiable parental consent for processing data of children under 18. The IT Rules have provisions for intermediary accountability. What is missing is the political will to extend these frameworks into a simple, enforceable age gate - one that puts the compliance burden squarely on platforms, not on parents or children.

The objections are predictable. Who will verify age? What about digital literacy and access for girls in rural India? These are genuine questions - but they are questions about implementation, not about whether the protection is necessary. Australia, Canada, and Indonesia are all working through the same questions in real time. India, with its scale of engineering talent and its existing digital public infrastructure, including Aadhaar and DigiLocker, is arguably better positioned than most to build a workable, privacy-respecting age verification system.