Wednesday 22 / July / 2026
The Indian state of Karnataka took an important step in March this year when it announced during the state budget discussion that it was considering banning social media access for children under 16, a proposal that has drawn passionate supporters and critics worldwide. The truth, however, is that such a ban, even if it sounds great on paper, is rarely enforceable, and our teens have already found ways around it before the ink dries on any such order.
A friend’s younger sister, now 16, has always had two Instagram accounts. The first is tidy, curated, and visible to her parents and extended family: birthday wishes, school trip photos, the odd motivational quote. The second is where she actually lives online, her real friendships, her unfiltered opinions, and a list of followers I am sure her parents would find deeply uncomfortable.
She set up the second account years ago, not out of fear of any ban, but simply because she is a teenager, and teenagers have always needed conversations their parents cannot hear. The ban, when it arrives with its rules and enforcement mechanisms, will change nothing about this. It will simply make her better at hiding.
This is the fundamental problem with such announcements. The intent is right. The execution is often impossible.
To be fair to the authorities, the problem is serious. India leads the world in reported cyberbullying. A McAfee survey found that 85% of Indian children reported being cyberbullied, the highest rate of any country surveyed, with extreme forms like racist harassment, sexual harassment, and threats of physical harm running significantly higher than the global average. In 2018, 37% of Indian teenagers reported being bullied online, a statistic that has since then surely gone up. The harm is real, documented, and in some cases severe enough to affect mental health, academic performance, and, in the worst cases, to end lives. A government responding with urgency is not wrong.
What is missing is the how. Details on enforcement are yet to be worked out. No rules have been published. No mechanism has been designed. Legal experts have questioned whether a state government even has constitutional authority to impose such a restriction, since digital regulation in India falls primarily under the central government’s jurisdiction under the Information Technology Act.
Globally, similar measures have found support, and the results are instructive. Australia launched its ban on social media for under-16s in December 2025, with fines of up to AUD 49.5 million for platforms that failed to enforce age restrictions. It was the first country to attempt this at scale, and governments everywhere, including in India, pointed to it as the model to follow. By March 2026, a survey by the Molly Rose Foundation found that most Australian under-16s retained access to banned platforms not through clever workarounds, but because platforms had simply failed to remove their accounts in the first place. Others who faced restrictions said circumventing the ban was easy. This could be achieved by using a parent’s Face ID, drawing moustaches to fool facial recognition, borrowing a sibling’s account, or running a VPN. By June 2026, Australia proposed doubling its maximum penalty to AUD 99 million after surveys showed children were still on the restricted platforms. The eSafety Commissioner is now investigating Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram for non-compliance. The restriction did not reduce access. It produced a generation fluent in privacy circumvention.
GCC authorities are watching this carefully and, to their credit, moving more thoughtfully. The UAE has gone furthest with actual legislation: a cabinet resolution bars children under 15 from social media entirely and restricts access for 15 to 16-year-olds through content controls, parental oversight tools, and usage limits. Bahrain has proposed a similar law. Qatar’s Child Digital Safety framework makes platforms and caregivers legally responsible for compliance. Oman’s telecom regulator has begun a formal review of children’s social media use. Saudi Arabia’s Shura Council has called for age verification requirements for users under 16. The region is not banning. It is building. That distinction matters.
This is where the teenager with two accounts becomes more than an anecdote. Her second account is the one most at risk for cyberbullying, precisely because it is invisible to the adults who might intervene. Online harm will not disappear once enforcement begins. It will migrate, as it already has for millions of children globally, to private accounts, encrypted apps, and unregulated corners of the internet where there is no platform accountability, no teacher who can see what is happening, no parent who knows to ask. A ban does not protect children from online harm. It simply ensures the harm happens out of sight. South Korea learned this when it imposed a shutdown policy on online gaming for minors: the effect on time spent online was practically insignificant, with sleep improving by an average of just 90 seconds a night.
What actually protects children is less dramatic and more demanding than a budget announcement.
It is digital literacy built into school curricula from an early age. It is platform design obligations that curb algorithmic aggression toward younger users: banning infinite scroll, restricting autoplay, and limiting content designed to provoke anxiety or outrage. It is parental tools with real transparency, not the theatrical controls platforms currently offer. And it is an honest conversation within families about what the internet actually contains, rather than the comfortable fiction that a rule on paper will keep it at a safe distance.
Karnataka was not wrong to act. The cyberbullying statistics alone demand a policy response. But raising an issue and solving it are not the same thing. Children who want to be online will be online. The only question policy can meaningfully answer is whether they will be online where adults can see them, guide them, and help them when something goes wrong, or in spaces designed to keep adults out.
