Every day, children open social-media accounts by clicking a button that says they accept a platform’s terms.
A case now before the Supreme Court asks a deceptively simple question about that routine transaction: what does such consent mean when the person giving it is legally a minor?
On September 10, a three-judge bench led by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant sought the Union government’s response to a public interest litigation filed by the Just Rights for Children Alliance. Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V Mohana were also on the bench.
The petition seeks stronger protections for users below 18, including more effective age checks and parental or guardian involvement in account creation.
The Court has not banned minors from social media, nor has it ruled that existing accounts held by children are illegal. The proceedings are at an earlier stage, with the government now being asked to respond to the issues raised.
During the hearing, however, the bench signalled that the current framework deserved scrutiny.
“We need some safeguards in India,” the Court observed. Justice Bagchi separately said that “there should be some firewalls.”
The Case Begins With Contract Law
The petition approaches child online safety from an unusual direction.
Rather than beginning with screen time or particular categories of harmful content, it focuses on the agreement a user enters when creating an account.
Social-media services generally require users to accept terms governing access to the platform, data collection, privacy and acceptable conduct. For an adult, clicking “agree” creates a familiar contractual relationship.
The PIL questions how that model applies to a child.
Under Indian contract law, minors generally do not have the same capacity as adults to enter binding contracts. The petitioner argues that digital platforms should therefore not be able to rely on children independently accepting contractual terms in the same way.
It wants parents or lawful guardians brought into that process.
If the Court ultimately accepts that the current model is inadequate, the consequences could reach well beyond social-media apps. Many online services operate through similar click-to-accept agreements.
Knowing a User’s Age Is the Hard Part
Requiring special protections for children sounds straightforward until a platform has to determine who is actually under 18.
Most services do not physically meet their users. A child can enter a date of birth on a screen, and a system that depends primarily on self-declaration can be relatively easy to circumvent.
The petition therefore seeks stronger age-assurance mechanisms.
It also proposes parental or guardian consent for minors, potentially supported by e-KYC or another legally recognised method of establishing the adult’s identity and authority.
That would represent a more demanding approach than simply asking a new user to state an age.
But it would also create another policy problem: stronger verification usually requires more information.
Child Safety and Privacy Can Pull in Different Directions
An effective age-verification system needs to distinguish adults from children with reasonable confidence.
Depending on its design, that could mean collecting identity documents, using a third-party verification service or relying on another method capable of establishing age.
Parental verification introduces additional data.
The stronger the identity check, the harder it may become for a child to bypass an age restriction. At the same time, requiring millions of users to provide additional information can create privacy and cybersecurity concerns of its own.
Policymakers would therefore have to decide not only how age is verified, but what happens to the information used in that process.
Questions about storage, access, retention and security would become central to any system built around stronger identity checks.
The Supreme Court has not prescribed a particular technological model. Those details would matter later if India moves towards a more formal age-assurance regime.
Petition Points to Grooming, Sextortion and Other Risks
The contractual argument sits within a much broader child-protection case.
The Just Rights for Children Alliance says weak age and identity controls can leave minors exposed to grooming, sexual exploitation, digital trafficking, sextortion, cyberbullying, behavioural profiling and inappropriate material.
Those are categories of risk identified by the petitioner. They should not be interpreted as a finding that every child using social media will encounter them or that every platform creates the same level of danger.
The petition also cites incidents in which online contact allegedly preceded attempts to exploit or move children.
Among the cases referenced are two minor girls who were allegedly approached with promises linked to becoming K-pop idols. They were later rescued while reportedly being taken towards the Siliguri and international-border region.
Such examples form part of the petitioner's argument that child-safety systems should intervene earlier rather than relying mainly on law enforcement after harm occurs.
‘Prevention by Design’ Shifts Responsibility to Platforms
The organisation is not asking for children to be removed from the internet altogether.
That distinction is important.
Children rely on digital services for education, research, examinations, communication and skills development. A blanket prohibition could restrict access to services that are useful or necessary.
The petition instead advocates what it calls “prevention by design”.
The idea is to make child safety part of how a service is built rather than an additional layer applied after a problem occurs.
For platforms, that could mean considering a user's age when designing account settings, recommendations, communication tools and other features.
Such an approach also changes where responsibility sits. Instead of assuming that children or parents must identify every risk themselves, some of the burden moves towards the companies designing the environment in which those interactions occur.
India Already Regulates Online Harm, but the PIL Identifies a Gap
India does not lack laws governing digital platforms or offences against children.
The Information Technology Act and associated rules impose obligations concerning unlawful online material, while legislation such as the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act addresses sexual offences involving minors.
The PIL is asking whether those protections adequately address a different stage of the relationship: the moment a child enters a digital platform and accepts its terms.
It argues that the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 do not provide a sufficiently effective and uniform mechanism for age verification and related safeguards.
The government will now have an opportunity to respond to that argument.
That response will be important because the Court is considering an area where several legal frameworks intersect: contract law, privacy, data protection, intermediary regulation and child protection.
A Global Argument Is Taking Different Forms
India is not alone in reconsidering the relationship between children and technology companies.
Governments elsewhere are experimenting with different approaches rather than converging on a single model.
Some have concentrated on minimum ages and parental permission. Others have targeted the way platforms are designed for younger users.
California, for example, has enacted measures restricting certain potentially addictive social-media features for users under 16, including infinite scroll and autoplay.
Other jurisdictions have pursued age-assurance requirements or restrictions on children's access to particular services.
Those experiments offer reference points, but India's eventual approach will have to operate within its own constitutional, contractual and data-protection framework.
With a vast population of young internet users, even a relatively narrow change to account verification could affect millions of families and reshape how global platforms operate in one of their largest markets.
What the Supreme Court Has Actually Done
The Court's observations have attracted attention because the underlying issue affects a large number of users. But the procedural position needs to remain clear.
The Supreme Court has sought the Centre's response to the PIL.
It has not ordered social-media companies to remove users below 18. It has not imposed a nationwide parental-consent requirement. And it has not declared children's existing social-media accounts unlawful.
The questions raised by the petition will have to be argued before any such conclusion can be drawn.
For now, the significance of the case lies in the problem the Court has agreed to examine.
Online platforms have spent years making account creation almost frictionless. For adults, that convenience is part of the product. For children, the same simplicity raises harder questions about whether they understand the agreements they are accepting and who should bear responsibility when they do not.
India's debate over children's social-media use may therefore turn on more than setting a minimum age.
The harder task will be designing a system that can identify and protect younger users without requiring everyone else to surrender unnecessary personal information simply to prove how old they are.
