Adolescents are often treated as passive subjects rather than active agents in policy discourse on technology. Discuss with examples.

Digital policy routinely casts adolescents as objects to be protected rather than participants to be consulted. Recent global regulatory action and India's data framework both illustrate this protectionist tilt — necessary in part, but incomplete without adolescent voice.

How policy frames adolescents as passive

• Design-liability remedies: Meta's 2026 settlement with a bipartisan coalition of US attorneys general (up to $17.1 billion) imposes a default two-hour daily limit and a midnight–6 a.m. block for under-18 users, liftable only by a parent [1]. Control is relocated to the guardian, not built in the teen.
• Blanket consent rules: Section 9, DPDP Act, 2023 treats everyone below 18 as a "child", mandating verifiable parental consent and barring tracking and targeted advertising — with no graduated recognition of evolving capacity [2].
• Content governance: the IT Rules, 2021 pursue child safety through intermediary due diligence, grievance officers and age-based self-classification of content — duties on platforms, no channel for young users' views [3].
• For nearly a century, media-effects research has asked what media do to the young rather than what the young do with media.

Evidence that adolescents are active agents

• Peer networks, not algorithms alone, drive migration across apps and short-video formats; teenagers curate feeds, switch platforms and negotiate norms.
• One in three internet users worldwide is a child, yet around 346 million young people remain offline [4] — access is itself a contested resource, so blunt restriction can widen the digital divide.
• Rights frameworks already affirm agency: UN CRC General Comment No. 25 (2021) on the digital environment upholds children's participation and was itself drafted after consulting 709 children across 28 countries [5].

Cost of the passivity framing

• Unconsulted rules invite circumvention — false ages, secondary accounts — weakening enforcement.
• Protection crowds out digital literacy and self-regulation capacity.
• Diverse users (first-generation entrants, children with disabilities) are homogenised into one "vulnerable" category.

Protection and participation are complements, not rivals. India can pair DPDP safeguards with age-tiered consent, school-level digital literacy under NEP 2020, and structured consultation of adolescents in rule-making — realising the Convention's promise that those most affected are also heard.