A character in Adolescence (the Netflix drama) observes, “You’re never really alone any more. Even when you think you are.” That single line captures the core anxiety driving recent policy moves — from Karnataka to Australia. The question is whether banning access addresses that problem, or merely displaces it.

On March 6, Karnataka announced that children under 16 would be barred from social media platforms. Technology companies would be required to implement age-verification systems. Messaging and gaming — where, incidentally, much of the actual harm occurs — would not be covered.

Two weeks later, a 14-year-old in Bengaluru opens Instagram. The app asks her age. She types 17. She is in. That is it. And that is the entire problem with Karnataka’s new social media ban — and every ban like it — in one small, effortless gesture.

Karnataka is not alone, and it is not even early to the party. Australia enacted what is being called the world’s strictest such law, in December 2025 — a blanket ban on social media access for under-16s, with platform fines of up to $50 million for non-compliance. France has passed legislation requiring parental consent for children under 15. The UK, Greece, Spain, Norway and Denmark are actively debating similar restrictions. In the US, Utah has moved at the State level. Andhra Pradesh, closer home, has announced a 90-day window to restrict access for children under 13.

The stated reasons are consistent across geographies — the effect on mental health, cyberbullying, screen addiction and declining academic performance. The research supporting these concerns is real, if contested at the margins. The anxiety among parents is genuine and growing. The political will to act — finally, after a decade of hand-wringing — appears to have arrived simultaneously across multiple continents.

Which makes this a good moment to ask what exactly are we doing here.

Three parties. Three alibis

Governments argue that the state has always drawn lines around what children can access — alcohol, tobacco, adult content, gambling. The logic of extending that protection to algorithmically engineered social media platforms is not, on the face of it, unreasonable. Platforms have had years to self-regulate. They have not. The carousel of apology tours by tech CEOs before various legislatures has produced nothing except improved PR coaching. Someone has to step in. The State is doing it.

Platforms counter — not without merit — that age verification at scale is technically fraught and privacy-invasive. Enforcing it meaningfully would require linking social media accounts to government-issued identity documents. In India, that points directly at Aadhaar and, in turn, a different set of concerns: Who holds that linkage, how is it stored, what happens when it is breached, and whether the cure is worse than the disease. They also raise the displacement argument — bans push children towards darker, less regulated corners of the internet.

Parents and civil society have been watching this exchange for years with mounting frustration. Their position is blunter: “Both of you are deflecting.”

Parents have not been asking for improved terms-of-service pages. They want tools. Schools have not been asking for awareness campaigns. They want guidance. The ban — for all its implementation gaps — feels like the first real acknowledgment from authority that something is genuinely, systemically broken.

All three positions contain truth. None of them, alone, is sufficient.

Wrong question, asked loudly

The ban debate, however, keeps skating past a more uncomfortable question. What exactly are we protecting children from?

From the platforms? Or from the content that platforms, with great engineering precision, decide to serve?

From addiction? Or from the loneliness, the social anxiety, the need for external validation, that makes addiction so appealing in the first place?

From their peers? Because peer pressure did not move online. It was always there. It simply found a faster, more public, 24-hour delivery mechanism. Digital literacy is an alternative most frequently offered by those sceptical of bans. It sounds sensible. Teach children to navigate the internet critically — to recognise manipulation, manage screen time and understand that the algorithm is not their friend. In the abstract, this is obviously the right long-term answer. In practice, ask who teaches it, in which school, in which medium, with what training, funded by whom. In India, the honest answer to that is largely silence.

Meanwhile, the platforms are not neutral utilities waiting to be navigated. Their recommendation engines are not passive. They are optimised, at great expense, to maximise engagement — which, for a 13-year-old brain still forming its sense of self, means maximising vulnerability. A ban does not dismantle that architecture. It just puts a gate in front of it.

The law exists. Not protection

India does not have the infrastructure to enforce what Karnataka has announced. There is no unified digital identity system capable of privacy-preserving age verification at platform scale. Aadhaar linkage is politically contentious and technically risky. A VPN is a five-minute download for any motivated teenager with a smartphone — which is most of them.

The enforcement will be uneven in a familiar way. Children from households with attentive, tech-literate parents will route around the ban with guidance or at least awareness. Children from households with less oversight — and arguably more vulnerable to begin with — will encounter it unaided, or not encounter it at all. The promised protection will be distributed by existing privilege.

Australia’s implementation is being watched closely precisely because it is trying to solve this problem rather than simply legislate around it. The results are not conclusive yet. The fines have focused platform attention in a way polite requests never did. Whether the age-verification technology will work at scale, without creating a parallel surveillance infrastructure, remains to be seen.

The algorithm doesn’t wait

Every generation produces its moral panic about what children consume. Comics were going to corrupt the young in the 1950s. Television was going to rot their brains in the 1970s. Video games were going to make them violent in the 1990s. In each case, the panic eventually subsided, the medium normalised, and the children turned out — mostly — fine.

It is tempting to file social media in that same cabinet, but probably wrong. The previous panics were about passive consumption. This time it’s more insidious — platforms engineered to extract attention, manufacture social comparison, monetise the gap between who a child is and who they fear they are not.

The question worth sitting with is not whether governments can ban their way out of this — they probably cannot with the available blunt instruments — but whether the harm being done to adolescent mental health and self-conception, while we debate at legislative pace, is the kind that waits.

The 14-year-old in Bengaluru has already logged back in. The algorithm already knows exactly what to show her next.

(Shubho Sengupta is a digital marketer with an analogue past and a social provocateur)

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Published on March 23, 2026