The Screen That Swallowed Our Children

The Screen That Swallowed Our Children

From Guwahati to Geneva, from Dimapur to Dublin, governments are racing to lock teenagers out of social media. But the real story – told in data, in research labs, and in the bedrooms of teenagers from Shillong to Sydney – is far more complicated than any law can capture.

PAHARI BARUAH

IT IS PAST MIDNIGHT in a small flat in Guwahati’s Bharalumukh locality. Priya, 15, should be asleep. Her parents think she is. But under her blanket, the blue light of her phone flickers –Instagram, then Snapchat, then a rabbit hole of YouTube Shorts. She has been doing this for two years.

“If they ban it,” she whispers, “I’ll just find another way.”

She is not alone. And she is not wrong.

Across the world, from Canberra to California, from London to Luxembourg, governments are passing laws, drafting policies, and making speeches about protecting children from social media. Australia has already crossed the Rubicon – in November 2024, it became the first country in the world to ban children under 16 from social media platforms, threatening companies with fines of up to AUD 49.5 million (roughly ₹270 crore) for non-compliance.

Europe is moving fast. The United States is catching up. And in India – including in Assam and the Northeast – the conversation has barely begun, even as millions of teenagers like Priya are already deep inside the digital maze.

The question everyone is asking: Do these bans actually work? The answer, it turns out, depends on who you ask – and what you consider “working.”

A World in Panic Mode

The global alarm over teenagers and social media did not come out of nowhere.

In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy – himself of Indian origin – did something extraordinary. He called for warning labels on social media platforms, the same kind placed on cigarette packs. “We would not accept the food or toy industry using their products to harm our children,” he wrote in The New York Times. “We should not accept it from the social media industry either.”

His concern was backed by frightening numbers. Between 2010 and 2020, rates of depression among American teenagers rose by 60 percent. Anxiety disorders shot up by 70 percent. Suicide rates among girls aged 10 to 14 tripled. Researchers like social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, whose 2024 book The Anxious Generation became an international bestseller, argued that smartphones and social media were the primary cause of what he called “the great rewiring of childhood.”

The numbers in India tell a different, but no less troubling, story. A 2023 NIMHANS (National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences) report found that 1 in 5 adolescents in India showed signs of problematic internet use. A survey by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) found that teenagers between 13 and 17 years old spend an average of 4.5 hours daily on social media – more than they spend in school.

In Assam, a state where internet penetration has surged dramatically since the Jio revolution of 2016, the picture is particularly stark. Rural and semi-urban youth who once had limited screen time are now online for hours at a stretch. School counsellors in Guwahati, Jorhat, and Silchar report growing cases of sleep disorders, attention deficits, and social withdrawal among teenagers – all tied to phone dependency.

Australia Fires the First Big Shot

On 29 November 2024, Australia enacted the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024. The law bans children under 16 from creating accounts on social media platforms. Companies must take “reasonable steps” to verify user age – or face massive fines.

The reaction was immediate and divided.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called it “a landmark moment for child safety.” Major platforms – Meta (Facebook, Instagram), TikTok, Snapchat, and X (formerly Twitter) – scrambled to comply while simultaneously lobbying against the law.

But researchers were less enthusiastic. Dr. Tama Leaver, a digital media expert at Curtin University in Perth, warned that “age verification without privacy protection is dangerous.” He pointed out that forcing platforms to collect identity documents from users – to check their age – could create massive new data vulnerabilities for children.

Others raised a more fundamental concern: young people will simply lie.

A UK survey by Ofcom found that 38 percent of children aged 8 to 17 had at least one social media profile that claimed they were over 18. In Australia, within weeks of the law passing, reports emerged of teenagers sharing VPN guides and fake date-of-birth strategies on the very platforms they were supposedly being banned from.

Europe’s Layered Approach

The European Union has taken a different path – not an outright ban, but a comprehensive framework.

The EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which came into full force in 2024, requires large platforms to conduct annual risk assessments for harms to minors, restrict algorithmic recommendation systems for underage users, and provide parents with better oversight tools.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), already in force since 2018, sets the age of digital consent at 16 (though member states can lower it to 13). Children’s data cannot be processed for advertising purposes.

France went further. In 2023, it passed a law requiring parental consent for children under 15 to use social media. Earlier this year, the French government announced it was piloting “pause numérique” – digital breaks – in schools, with phones entirely banned during school hours.

Germany has launched its own investigations into Instagram and TikTok’s recommendation algorithms, particularly the way they push content related to eating disorders and extreme diets to teenage girls.

The European model is imperfect. Enforcement is uneven. Critics argue the laws are too slow to keep pace with rapidly changing technology. But advocates say it is more honest about the complexity of the problem than a simple blanket ban.

The United States: Lawsuit Country

In America, the approach has been characteristically litigious.

Forty-one states have filed suits against Meta, alleging the company “knowingly designed” its platforms to be addictive to children. In one internal document leaked during litigation, a Meta researcher had written that the platform was “destroying children’s mental health” – a phrase that became front-page news across the world.

The U.S. Congress has repeatedly tried and failed to pass federal child online safety legislation. The KOSA (Kids Online Safety Act) has stalled multiple times, caught in a crossfire between child safety advocates, free speech absolutists, and Big Tech lobbyists.

Individual states have been more aggressive. Utah passed a law in 2024 requiring parental consent for minors to use social media and restricting use between 10:30 PM and 6:30 AM. Texas attempted to ban minors from creating social media accounts entirely – a law that was struck down by a federal court as unconstitutional.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has opposed several of these laws, arguing they violate young people’s free speech rights and could lead to dangerous surveillance of all internet users in the name of age verification.

The Research Divide: What Science Actually Says

Here is where it gets genuinely complicated.

Jonathan Haidt’s work – which argues smartphones and social media directly caused the teenage mental health crisis – has been massively influential. His data shows a near-perfect correlation between the rise of smartphone use (roughly 2012 onwards) and rising teen anxiety and depression in Western countries.

But correlation, as every scientist knows, is not causation.

Psychologist Amy Orben of Cambridge University has challenged Haidt’s conclusions directly. Her meta-analysis of over 400 studies found that the association between social media use and poor mental health in teenagers was “about as large as the association between wearing glasses and poor mental health” – in other words, small and likely non-causal. She argues that social media may be a symptom of existing social problems, not their cause.

A 2023 Oxford Internet Institute study that followed teenagers for three years found no consistent causal relationship between social media use and depression or anxiety. The lead researcher, Professor Andrew Przybylski, has publicly criticised calls for bans as “moral panic” unsupported by rigorous science.

The truth may lie somewhere in between. Most experts now agree on a more nuanced picture: social media is not harmful to all teenagers equally. Those who are already vulnerable – due to family problems, poverty, learning difficulties, or existing mental health conditions – are significantly more at risk. And certain types of content (pro-eating-disorder communities, cyberbullying, violent or sexual material served by recommendation algorithms) cause documented harm.

For teenagers in Northeast India, this nuance matters enormously. A young girl in a Manipuri village using Facebook to connect with a college mentor, access career information, and escape social isolation is having a very different experience from a bored, affluent Guwahati teenager scrolling Instagram for eight hours a day.

The Northeast India Dimension: A Story Barely Told

Assam and the Northeast have their own social media story – and it is different from anything happening in Australia or Europe.

Here, social media is not just entertainment. It is infrastructure.

For communities in remote districts of Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, or Mizoram, platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp are often the only way to access health information, connect with government services, or find employment. A blanket ban on teenage social media use in such contexts could cut young people off from critical resources, not just from viral dance videos.

The Northeast has also seen social media play a life-saving role during floods, earthquakes, and ethnic conflicts – when official communication systems fail, communities organise rescue and relief through Facebook groups and WhatsApp chains. Teenagers are often at the centre of this digital community organising.

At the same time, the region has seen serious social media-related harms. Rumour-driven violence in Assam, manipulated videos during the 2023 Manipur crisis, sextortion cases involving teenage girls, and radicalisation through social media have all been documented.

Bhaskar Phukan, a school counsellor at a government higher secondary school in Jorhat, has seen both sides. “I have students who discovered their passion for music, found scholarships, and built careers through social media,” he says. “And I have students whose mental health completely collapsed because of cyberbullying. The same tool. Completely different outcomes.”

The Displacement Problem: Bans Don’t Delete Harm, They Move It

Perhaps the most serious challenge to the ban argument is what researchers call the “displacement effect.”

When one platform is restricted or blocked, users – especially determined teenagers – do not stop using social media. They migrate.

In China, where social media is heavily restricted and teenagers are allowed only one hour of gaming per day, studies have found significant rises in the use of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) and access to unregulated platforms through workarounds. Young people who were displaced from regulated spaces ended up in darker corners of the internet with no safety features at all.

In Australia, within two months of the new law passing, searches for “how to make fake ID for Instagram” increased by over 300 percent among Australian teenagers, according to cybersecurity firm NortonLifeLock.

The logic is not reassuring: a teenager who is desperate, lonely, or already in a harmful online environment will not obey a law just because a parliament passed it. They will simply find a less safe version of what they were already doing – and do it in places where adults cannot see them.

What Actually Works? The Evidence Is Slowly Emerging

If bans are blunt instruments, what does the evidence suggest might actually help?

1. Design changes, not bans. Research consistently shows that specific design features – infinite scroll, algorithmic content that maximises “engagement” (often meaning anger or anxiety), the removal of chronological feeds, likes and follower counts – are harmful in ways that platform-level bans are not. Forcing platforms to redesign these features for underage users (or all users) may be more effective than blocking access entirely.

2. Media literacy education. Several European countries – notably Finland, Estonia, and the Netherlands – have invested heavily in teaching children how algorithms work, how to spot misinformation, and how to manage their own digital lives. Early data from Finland suggests this approach correlates with better mental health outcomes among teenagers than in countries pursuing access restrictions.

3. Parental tools that actually work. Currently, parental control features on most platforms are clunky and easy to bypass. Mandatory, meaningful parental oversight tools – rather than theatrical age verification – may be more effective.

4. Treating the underlying causes. Many researchers argue that the rise in teenage anxiety is real, but its causes are complex: economic insecurity, academic pressure, social isolation, climate anxiety, family breakdown. Social media may amplify existing distress, but rarely creates it from nothing. Addressing the root causes – better mental health services, less brutal academic pressure, stronger community bonds – may do more than any app restriction.

5. Sleep protection. The clearest harm from social media may simply be disrupted sleep. Several studies show that the most damaging usage pattern is nighttime phone use. France’s experiment with phone-free school nights, and several US states’ laws restricting social media between certain hours, target this specific harm with more precision than a blanket ban.

The Children Nobody Asked

In the global debate about protecting teenagers from social media, one voice is conspicuously absent: teenagers themselves.

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child – ratified by India in 1992 – requires that children’s views be taken into account in decisions affecting them. In practice, most social media legislation around the world has been drafted with minimal meaningful input from young people.

When teenagers are consulted, the picture is complicated. Many report that social media causes them anxiety and that they wish they used it less. But many also report that it is essential to their social lives, their sense of community, and their access to information – especially for LGBTQ+ teens, children in rural areas, and those with disabilities, for whom online communities may be the only place they feel accepted.

A 17-year-old student from Dimapur, Nagaland, who identifies as queer, put it bluntly in a youth forum earlier this year: “If you ban social media for teenagers, you’re not protecting me. You’re isolating me. The internet is the only place I could find other people like me.”

It is a sentiment that policymakers, in their rush to be seen as doing something, too often dismiss.

What Should Government Do?

India does not currently have a specific law banning minors from social media. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (DPDP Act) requires parental consent for processing data of children under 18 and prohibits tracking and targeted advertising to minors – provisions that, if enforced, could significantly change how platforms operate in India.

But enforcement remains the challenge. India’s data protection authority is still being set up. Platforms routinely collect data from teenagers in violation of existing laws. Age verification in a country without universal digital ID systems is a practical nightmare.

Several state governments – including in Assam – have attempted to address excessive phone use among students through school-level bans on mobile phones. But these apply only during school hours and address only the tip of the iceberg.

What India urgently needs is a genuine conversation – not a panic-driven ban that ignores the complexity of how young people, especially in the Northeast, actually live their digital lives.

Back in Bharalumukh

It is morning now. Priya has finally fallen asleep, her phone still warm on the pillow beside her. She has been online for four hours.

Her mother, who will wake her in another hour for school, does not know. Her school has no counsellor trained in digital wellness. Her state has no specific policy on teenage social media use. The platforms she uses have her data, her preferences, her emotional patterns – and are using all of it to keep her scrolling.

Somewhere in Canberra, a law is being debated. Somewhere in Brussels, a framework is being drafted. Somewhere in Washington, a lawsuit is being filed.

None of it, yet, has reached Bharalumukh.

The world is trying to protect children like Priya. The question is whether it is listening to them – or just passing laws about them.

Data cited in this article draws from NIMHANS (2023), IAMAI (2023), the Oxford Internet Institute, Cambridge University, the Australian eSafety Commissioner, the EU Digital Services Act compliance reports, and the U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on Social Media and Youth Mental Health (2023). All names of individuals in Assam and Northeast India have been changed or are composites to protect privacy.

Mahabahu.com is an Online Magazine with collection of premium Assamese and English articles and posts with cultural base and modern thinking.  You can send your articles to editor@mahabahu.com / editor@mahabahoo.com (For Assamese article, Unicode font is necessary) Images from different sources.