Social Media Addiction: Children of the Feed

THE BOY CLIMBS THE narrow staircase to the terrace just after dusk, when the heat begins to lift. From the roof of his house in Rajapalayam, a town in southern Tamil Nadu, the internet works better than it does inside. That is where he plays. He is 15. Six months ago, after weeks of persuasion, his parents—the father works in a retail store, the mother in a clothing factory—bought him a Rs 45,000 phone so he could run Genshin Impact smoothly. The game is an open-world role-playing game (RPG) built around exploration, combat and a system of randomised rewards. Ganesh S (name changed) plays for about six hours a day, of which three hours are just for conversation—text and chats, Instagram shares, and time spent on Discord servers where the game spills over into everything else, from money and relationships to where to study and to work. “Even if I play only for an hour, chatting is a must. It’s my way of staying connected with the world from this small town,” says Ganesh, who has made many friends, his age as well as adults, online. He was approached by a 43-year-old departmental store owner from Dubai who offered him a job as a “tech backend manager”—on the condition that he drop out of school and move. The offer did not materialise into anything concrete, but the exchange serves as a measure of how porous online spaces can be: a teenager on a rooftop in southern Tamil Nadu, in conversation with an adult stranger across continents, with no intermediary.

 If Ganesh’s world is stitched together through chats and game servers, others his age inhabit a far more vis­ible version of the same network, one where childhood unfolds in public. Anantya Anand got her first device, a mobile phone, at the age of 13. It wasn’t an unusually early age to receive a phone, her mother Nisha Anand says, since most children in her circle had already begun to get phones and iPads by then. If anything, the phone was probably a bit delayed, given how Anantya had already created a large online following on social media long before.

Having begun to first appear on YouTube videos created by family members when she was just around four years old, Anantya was such a natural before the camera that her mother Nisha set up a YouTube channel for her—MyMissAnand—that rapidly grew to become one of the most popular YouTube chan­nels for kids in India, numbering 13.9 million subscribers today, with an equally impressive 5.76 lakh followers on Instagram.

Today at the age of 16, Anand is considered to be one of the most popular teen influencers in the country. But with this growth in online popularity has also come a nagging sense of fear of the perils that lurk on social media. “Anantya understands social media and the dangers there quite well. But from a very young age, I’ve tried to also be very careful that she remains safe there,” Nisha says.

This would involve allowing access to her social media ac­counts only through Nisha’s phone. And even when Anand was given a phone when she turned 13, her mother made sure she retained access to the accounts and routinely checked on the content being posted, and the comments and the messages being exchanged. Sometimes, there would be comments, Nisha says, that were hurtful, like those that remarked on Anand’s manners or, when she grew up from a child into a teen, on her changing appearance. “I would feel hurt and it would upset me. But it didn’t matter much to Anand, probably because that’s how this genera­tion is,” she says.

It made sense that Nisha took such a cautious approach. There is not a lot of large-scale data that looks specifically at the use of social media by children in India, but those that exist point to a massive growth in such usage, coupled with a troubling rise of abuse directed towards children online. Rati Foundation, a Mumbai-based NGO that works at creating safe spaces for women, children and marginalised genders, conducted a study a couple of years ago where they surveyed 1,277 teens aged between 13 and 17 years across several cities and rural areas, belonging to both affluent and low-income households, in different parts of the country. The researchers found that about 84 per cent of the teens surveyed had a social media account, even though full control over their accounts was uneven, because nearly half of these teens had accounts that were logged in through borrowed devices and about 45 per cent created without a personal email id. The surveyors also discovered substantial exposure to online harms with 6 to 15 per cent of those surveyed reporting they had  peers who had faced threats, blackmail, trolling, or body shaming, and 9 per cent knowing someone whose intimate images had been shared online without consent. Conducting such a survey with minors comes with its own challenges. If children report any form of sexual abuse to adults, they have a legal liability to report it to the police, something which might result in a lot of children not opening up. “So we framed the survey in a way where we asked them if they were aware of someone who suffered through such issues,” says Siddharth Pillai, a cofounder of Rati Foundation.

Rati Foundation also runs a helpline called Meri Trustline, where Pillai and his colleagues help callers deal with issues they face online, from helping take down objectionable non-consensu­al content that is shared online to counselling them, and aiding in pursuing the matter with the police, and later, the courts. About 25 per cent of all those who call, Pillai says, are children, and the biggest issue they see rising is what they call image-based abuse. “Essentially, images found on the internet [photographs uploaded on social media, for instance] are being repurposed [objection­ably] or private content is being leaked online. This kind of im­age manipulation is becoming very common, and then there is the use of AI to morph images and videos and use them to extort and blackmail,” Pillai says, pointing out that even while they get such content taken down, the frequency with which they keep reappearing online is increasing. “In the first year [of the helpline becoming operational], for every 150 callers we helped, we had to take action to take down 200 pieces of content. The second year, it went up to 500 pieces of content for every 150 cases. Now it is like 1,100 pieces of content for every 150 cases. The abuse keeps com­ing back online, and it now has its own ecosystem, with people who archive these images and create small albums to sell them online,” he says.

IN GHAZIABAD EARLIER this year, three sisters—aged 12, 14 and 16—jumped from the ninth floor of their apartment building. Investigations suggested prolonged, immersive phone use and increasing withdrawal from school and social life. In the days before the incident, their father had taken away their phones, apparently triggering acute distress. Was it an un­forgivable act, to take away a child’s phone, he would later won­der aloud. The case resists simplification. The isolation had set in earlier. The devices were not the origin so much as the medium through which it deepened. But the case has come to represent the scale of the problem in the public imagination.

Policy has begun to catch up with this unease. In Andhra Pradesh, the Telugu Desam Party has urged the Union govern­ment to consider age-based regulation of social media, citing ris­ing concerns around addiction, cyber-bullying and exposure to harmful content. Karnataka, meanwhile, is exploring both age restrictions and a digital detox approach, including capping rec­reational screen time. The framing is not merely administrative but also political. A senior official involved in the discussions describes it as an attempt to set a broader precedent: the Con­gress government, he says, wants Karnataka to “set the agenda for India” on internet use and addiction. “We hope the Centre will emulate our law and step in to protect our children,” he says.

The question indeed occupies many countries. Australia has passed a law barring those under 16 from holding social media accounts, placing the burden of enforcement on platforms. The UK and parts of Europe are exploring similar age-verification sys­tems. These moves are often described as precautionary but they are also experimental, testing how far regulation can reach into what is now a deeply embedded infrastructure of everyday life.

For Nikhil Pahwa, a technology policy commentator, the prob­lem is not only who is on these platforms, but how they are built. Social media platforms, he argues, are no longer neutral spaces of communication; they are optimisation engines. Platforms now learn, in granular detail, what keeps users engaged—what they pause on, replay, react to—and then feed them more of it. This is not incidental. It is the core of the business model. For teenagers, this creates a loop that is difficult to exit. The capacity for self-regu­lation does not arrive fully formed at 16 like a licence issued across a counter, says Pahwa; it accrues in stages. To treat adolescence as a before-and-after problem—offline, then abruptly online—is to misread how young people actually come into themselves. “You don’t want to just push them into the deep end of the pool at 16 or 18,” he says, “instead of bringing them into it gradually.” The difficulty, he admits, is that such nuance resists being written cleanly into law.

More fundamentally, Pahwa is sceptical of the child imagined by regulation: compliant, containable, waiting to be protected. Children, he points out, are already improvisers. They lie about their age, migrate across platforms, slip from YouTube Kids to YouTube, from public feeds to private groups, from regulated spaces to encrypted ones. “Kids will find a way,” he says. A law that assumes otherwise, that imagines restriction as impermeable, is structurally naïve.

Pahwa is wary of the tendency to collapse all platforms into a single object called “social media”. The ecosystems are not inter­changeable. A messaging app is not a public feed; a child-oriented interface is not its adult counterpart. Some degree of parental agency, he suggests, is unavoidable, even necessary—particularly as children grow older and begin to encounter the world in more complex ways, through news, debate, or specialised communi­ties. The current push to identify and to authenticate users’ age, he argues, is both impractical and disproportionate. To hand this responsibility to operating systems or app stores is to conscript what he calls “technology neutral players” into a problem they did not create. Expanding verification outward risks building a more surveilled internet without touching the underlying ar­chitecture of harm.

Many, however, remain convinced that there is no other way of protecting children from the threats on social media apart from taking them off these platforms entirely. “We have been just passing the buck for years on this issue,” says Nirali Bhatia, a cyber psychologist and the founder of an anti-cyber bullying organisation, Cyber BAAP (Cyber Bullying Awareness, Action and Prevention), who works closely with children. “What we need now is a strong enforced action in the form of a ban.”

Bhatia is routinely called in to counsel and help children deal with issues they face online. These range from instances of cyber-bullying to severe cases like those involving grooming and extorting sexual favours from victims. One of the cases she was involved in was the infamous ‘Bois Locker Room’ case, where young boys from a school in Delhi were sharing photographs of their female classmates and detailing lewd fantasies on an Insta­gram chat group. A sister of one of the girls whose images were shared on that chat group had reached out to Bhatia for help just days before screenshots of chats from that group leaked out and caused outrage. “More than the pictures that were being shared, it was the aggressive comments that were worrying,” she says.

In a similar incident, a 14-year-old girl from a top Bengaluru school had posted a photograph on Instagram three months ago. A classmate turned it into a joke. He cropped, re-captioned, and circulated it across private groups. Screenshots carried it beyond its original audience. The girl withdrew first from conversations, then from school. Her eating patterns changed. Her sleep became irregular. The distress surfaced only later, when her parents dis­covered she had begun self-harming.

Sonal Raja, a Bengaluru-based clinical psychologist who works with children, parents and schools, describes a bright, socially adjusted boy who had once been active in school and sport. After the pandemic, his screen use grew steadily harder for his parents to regulate. What began as admiration for how much he seemed to be learning online gave way to something else: he stopped going to school regularly, slept at four in the morning, grew malnourished, and withdrew into his room. An­other psychologist, Raja says, had diagnosed him with autism. She disagreed. For her, the more disturbing point was not only the severity of the withdrawal, but how easily prolonged digital immersion could be mistaken for a different condition altogether. “I see very, very young children who don’t make eye contact and are showing all symptoms of autism but they are not autistic; they are exposed to social media,” she says. Children’s addiction, she suggests, is not simply addiction scaled down; it is its own field, entangled with development, emotion and family life. “I think that a ban, at least a guideline, is useful,” she says. “At least there is some deterrent.”

Even as states like Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh move toward bans, the Centre appears to be reflecting on the complexity of the problem. Government sources reportedly indicated recently that a blanket prohibition for teenagers is unlikely. Instead, what is being considered is a graded, age-based framework, with different levels of access and restriction for children across age groups—8 to 12, 12 to 16, and 16 to 18—along with measures such as time-bound usage, parental consent and platform-level safeguards.

This is, in some sense, an attempt to translate what experts, clinicians and critics have been circling around in different ways. The younger child who drifts into content without context, the adolescent who seeks connection, the teenager who tests bound­aries—each inhabits a different relationship to the same device. To treat them alike is to misunderstand both risk and capacity.

If there is a consensus taking shape, it is a tentative one: that the answer lies neither in abandoning the field to platforms nor in sealing it off entirely, but in building something more deliber­ate, and perhaps more difficult—a system that recognises both the risks of the network and the fact that, for a generation now growing up within it, there is no outside.