"We will ban social media for them," he said.Responding to queries on how will it be regulated - in schools, colleges or at home, Siddaramaiah said, "We will formulate a programme for that. "Prime Minister (Narendra) Modi had also spoken about securing the interest of our younger generations at the AI summit, recently. I had further asked for restrictions on smartphone use among children in my parliament speech. I hope this too will be looked into seriously," he said.Aparajita Bharti, Founding Partner at the Quantum Hub opined that a social media ban however is unlikely to have the desired effect in India given the high incidence of shared device usage in households. Further, it is also an imperfect measure, given that it is hard to define 'social media' and the assumption that only a certain kind of platforms are harmful for children is not grounded in evidence.In 2025, Australia became the first country to ban social media for children under 16 by blocking access to platforms including TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook.Indonesia has also banned social media for children under the age of 16.>

Source: Economic Times March 07, 2026 11:03 UTC