Why banning kids from the internet might do more harm than good

If you are a parent wondering about how to reduce your child’s screen time in the new year, you are not alone. Two judges of the Madurai bench of the Madras high court recently urged the Union government to consider imposing a law to restrict children from accessing the internet. Their idea is inspired by a recent legislation in Australia, which banned social media for under-16s.

Studies around the world show that children are exposed to inappropriate content online everyday, face cyberbullying, and are vulnerable to scammers and other abusers, which lead to mental health breakdowns, low self-esteem, body dysphoria and, in extreme cases, suicide ideation. In recent times, artificial intelligence agents have also abetted such harmful behaviours. Responding to a public interest litigation filed in 2018, the court suggested better awareness be created among parents and children about the dangers that lurk online.

Countries around the world are observing Australia’s move. Whether similar restrictive laws come through elsewhere or not, bans are not a foolproof solution. If prohibitions had the power to solve problems, the world be free of drugs, crime, hate, and violence. Ironically, it would have also become more despotic, with no space for dissent.

Although all social media platforms have a minimum legal age requirement to register an account, users circumvent the rule easily due to lack of stringent age verification tools. With a ban in place, such practices are only going to get ubiquitous, as Unicef recently warned. There is now talk of making social media access stricter by mandating users to sign-in with government IDs and biometric details. While such a rule may prevent underage users from getting on these platforms, it is also going to cut out others who don’t have the required IDs or refuse to share personal details with Big Tech.

As scholar Shoshana Zuboff shows in her 2018 book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, social media users concede massive amounts of data to tech giants, which mine the information to train the algorithms that run these behemoths. More layers of verification may deepen the surveillance economy, making users like journalists, activists and whistleblowers more vulnerable to state overreach. Such a policy also makes it easy to start collecting data from early on, when the users are still in school.

While countries like Germany, France, the Netherlands and South Korea debate issues of parental consent and limiting the use of cellphones in classrooms, the fact remains that the under-16s—or Gen Alpha—are born into a world where they are exposed to the internet from infancy. With parents and adults documenting every milestone of their lives on social media, the young are growing up intimately aware of handheld devices. When a baby throws a tantrum, parents default to using a screen as a pacifier. On public transport, young people see adults lost in their phones, scrolling through noisy reels. A family outing at a restaurant often ends up with each person absorbed in their phone. Instead of getting out and playing in parks, which are anyway rare in Indian cities, children get hooked to video games behind locked doors.

Eventually, when Gen Alpha joins the workforce, many of their colleagues will be robots and the tools of their trade fully tech-enabled, as a recent study published by International Workplace Group found. Keeping young people away from the internet isn’t going to help them to make a life for themselves. Instead, it would be more useful to train them to become ethical and responsible citizens of their inevitable digital future.