Media365
Saturday’s report of the Supreme Court’s October 15 order has been read, rightly, as a defeat for the social media ban. Justices J B Pardiwala and K Vinod Chandran held that access to the internet is a fundamental right that children share “irrespective of their age”, that a blanket restriction is no answer, and that keeping children offline because platforms fail to remove abuse material “would be to mistake the victim for the problem”. Having spent months arguing against Karnataka’s under-16 proposal, we can take the win. But look at what the order and everything around it quietly agree on. That is where the next fight is.
Seventeen days earlier, on September 28, a bench led by the Chief Justice heard a second petition by the same alliance. The bench asked the Centre to examine whether anyone under 18 should need a parent’s consent to open an account, and the Solicitor General said the Data Protection law’s parental-consent model could be adopted in some other law to do it. The Pardiwala bench, for its part, recommended “parental consent, guidance and oversight” with a dedicated child mode. The petitioner wants it, the government wants it, both benches want it. It is the one proposal in this debate with no opponent.
The Data Protection Rules, notified last November and due to bite in 2027, say a platform may not process a child’s data without verifiable consent from a parent, and that it must confirm the parent is an adult using “reliable details of identity and age”, with a government-notified digital locker as one route. A platform cannot know which of its users are children without asking all of them. For every user who is a child, an adult must then produce government-grade proof of who they are and how old they are. The platform keeps enough to prove it did this, and the child’s account is tethered to a named adult’s identity record for good.
Read the Pardiwala order’s own warning against that. Age-based restrictions, the bench wrote, “inevitably, always require identifying and ascertaining the age of each and every user, continuous collection and monitoring of sensitive data and an overall disproportionate risk of misuse and surveillance”. Every word applies to parental consent as the Rules define it. The only difference from a ban is that the child gets in, once an adult has been identified on her behalf. The court has described the disease and prescribed it.
Then there is who the parent is. In the factsheet we published in August, we flagged that family-mediated gatekeeping deepens inequalities where the household already controls the device, and ASER 2024 shows rural girls of 14 to 16 already own fewer phones and use social media less than boys. A consent regime makes the father the platform’s compliance officer. For a girl in a conservative home, a queer teenager, a child being abused by the very adult who holds the Aadhaar, “parental oversight” is not a safeguard. It is the problem with a legal mandate behind it.
Why has this proposal attracted no resistance? Because platforms can live with it, and the state gets a verified identity layer across the entire social internet without ever having to pass a law that says so. And the people it costs, children and the adults tied to their accounts, were never in the room.
The order leaves a harder route open, which is why nobody has taken it. The bench named it in passing, accounts private by default, no contact from unknown adults, controls on advertising to children. These are obligations on the platform, which the Centre can impose under the IT Rules without new legislation and without a single identity check. Where age must be known at all, the check can return one bit, over or under, and nothing else. And the court has asked the Centre to report on what tools platforms actually use to detect and remove abuse material. That report is the test. If the answer is thin, the remedy is penalties for the platform, not papers from the parent. The ban was always the easy thing to oppose. The consensus is the dangerous thing.
The writer is associated with Internet Freedom Foundation
