Karnataka’s social media ban is unlikely to keep children, teenagers offline

The Karnataka government’s proposal to ban social media access for children under the age 16 seems like a decisive and a long overdue step towards protecting young people from online harms.

But policies built on prohibition often collapse the moment they meet reality.

A blanket ban on social media for under-16s is deeply problematic, practically unenforceable, and risks undermining children’s rights in the digital age. It also reflects a growing policy reflex: when faced with digital risks, governments reach for bans instead of building systems that help children navigate the internet safely.

They shift responsibility away from platforms, reduce incentives to build safer systems and ignore the evolving capacities of young people themselves.

Karnataka appears to have taken a leaf out of Australia’s playbook, where the government banned teenagers and children under the age of 16 from having social media accounts. Three months on, it is unclear how effective Australia’s experience has been.

Social media bans make headlines, but harder questions remain unresolved: how will age be verified across platforms and how will children’s rights be protected? It is also unclear if it is even legal or technically feasible for a state government to ban social media access for teenagers.

The full contours of Karnataka’s proposal are still unclear, but regulating access to digital platforms, enforcing age verification, and compelling compliance from global technology companies typically falls within domains governed by central law and platform-level regulation. Without clarity on these questions, the proposal risks becoming symbolic.

Similarly, what happens when teenagers simply bypass restrictions? Because they almost always do.

Just as alcohol prohibition, instead of eliminating drinking, simply pushed it underground, digital bans are likely to have the same effect.

When access is blocked, teenagers will find workarounds, like borrowing devices, using a sibling’s account, misstating their age or migrating to smaller, less moderated platforms. Their digital activities continue, but will be less visible to their parents, educators and regulators.

That is why enforcement is such a weak foundation for digital policy. Social media platforms already struggle to verify the age of billions of users worldwide. Expecting perfect compliance on age verification demands ignores the technical and behavioural realities of how young people use the internet.

Blanket bans also collide with children’s rights. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child recognises that children have the right to access information, express themselves and participate in society. In 2021, General Comment number 25 clarified that these rights extend to the digital environment. States are obligated to protect children from harm online and also to ensure they can meaningfully access digital spaces that support learning, expression and participation.

A ban disrupts the balance between protection and participation. It assumes the safest child is the disconnected child. But for many young people, the internet is where they learn, communicate, discover opportunities and participate in culture. Removing access entirely does away with the opportunity to build resilience and digital literacy under guidance.

Research carried out by the PIIIR Foundation, which this author is associated with, offers a useful reality check. The study of 200 school students between the ages of 13-16 in Rajasthan examined how teenagers actually encounter “consent” and privacy decisions while using apps. The results complicate several assumptions that underpin prohibition-style policies. First, teenagers are not as confused about digital consent as often assumed: 91% of the students demonstrated a clear understanding of what consent means, defining it as being asked for permission and having the option to agree or refuse.

Second, the common assumption that parents are better equipped to manage digital privacy settings does not always hold up. As many as 89.5% of the students said their parents do not understand app settings better than they do, while only 10.5% believed their parents were more capable of navigating these controls. Another key data insight from the research is how easily age-based restrictions are bypassed: 80.5% of the 200 students surveyed admitted they had entered a fake age at least once to create an online account, while only 19.5% said they had not.

Many regulatory proposals rely heavily on parental gatekeeping as the central mechanism for protecting children online. But if parents themselves are not consistently comfortable navigating platform settings, permissions, and privacy controls, then policies built entirely around parental oversight risk becoming symbolic rather than practical.

The issue becomes even clearer when we look at how digital consent functions in practice. Permission prompts for camera access, location sharing, or contacts rarely appear as moments of thoughtful decision-making. They appear as quick interruptions in an app’s flow. Teenagers, like adults, often click through them quickly in order to continue using the service.

The problem here is the design of digital systems.

If policymakers truly want to protect children online, the conversation must shift from who clicks “allow” to how platforms design choices.

That is the direction that global child-rights thinking has been moving. Scholars such as Professor Sonia Livingstone, a leading voice on children’s digital rights, have repeatedly cautioned against simplistic restrictions on internet access. Bans, she argues, reflect adult anxieties rather than evidence about how children spend time online.

A more effective approach focuses on age-appropriate design, safer defaults, and stronger platform accountability, rather than exclusion. Instead of trying to keep children away from the internet, governments should ensure the internet is built with children in mind.

Countries such as the United Kingdom have already moved in that direction through frameworks like the Age Appropriate Design Code, which requires platforms likely to be accessed by children to implement high privacy defaults, limit profiling and avoid manipulative design practices. That kind of regulatory approach recognises the truth that children are already online.

The real policy question is how digital spaces, which teenagers access, should be designed and governed so that children’s safety, dignity, and development are protected.

Policies should treat children as developing citizens learning to navigate the world around them.

Salik Khan is the founder of PIIR Foundation, a non-profit organisation dedicated to protecting children’s rights in the digital world.