Critically evaluate whether India should consider a minimum-age threshold for social media access, drawing lessons from France and Australia.

The WHO's Health Behaviour in School-aged Children survey found problematic social media use among adolescents rising from 7% to 11% between 2018 and 2022 [1]. With Australia enforcing an under-16 ban and France legislating a "digital majority" at 15, India must weigh a similar threshold — the case is strong in principle but demands a graded, rights-compliant design rather than a blanket prohibition.

The case for a threshold

• Documented harm: adolescent mental-health and addiction risks are now measured, not anecdotal [1].
• Proven enforceability: Australia places the duty on platforms, not parents, with penalties up to A$49.5 million; eSafety reported roughly 4.7 million under-16 accounts removed soon after the December 2025 commencement [2].
• Legal continuity: India already treats every person under 18 as a "child" under Section 9, DPDP Act 2023, mandating verifiable parental consent and barring tracking and targeted advertising [3]. A threshold extends this logic rather than breaking from it.

Grounds for caution

• Privacy trade-off: universal age verification compels all users to prove identity, and must survive the proportionality test in Puttaswamy [4].
• Contested legality: France's under-15 law, passed in July 2026, faces constitutional challenge and collides with the EU's exclusive competence over platform regulation [5] — a caution against legislating ahead of institutional clarity.
• Exclusion and evasion: bans sever adolescents from learning, civic and peer-support networks, and invite VPN and false-age workarounds.
• Capacity gap: credible enforcement needs privacy-preserving, tokenised age assurance of the kind the European Commission is still piloting [6].

Lessons for India

• Regulate addictive design — autoplay, streaks, engagement loops — before regulating the child [6].
• Build restrictions atop the DPDP consent architecture, graded by age rather than absolute.
• Notify a threshold only after an indigenous, privacy-preserving age-assurance standard is tested.

India should therefore keep a minimum-age threshold firmly on the policy table, but as the culmination of a design-and-consent regime, not its opening move. Sequencing platform accountability first, age-gating second, protects the child without sacrificing the Article 21 privacy guarantee — the balance both Puttaswamy and the DPDP framework already envisage.