India, Feb. 19 -- There have been some strong indications that the Union government is considering age-based restrictions on social media. While the Economic Survey recommended this, Union IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw on Tuesday spoke about the need to protect children from social media harm. A senior IT ministry official told HT that deliberations are on, including with social media platforms. If India eventually adopts age-based restrictions, it will join a growing list of countries and jurisdictions that are turning to legislation to manage the fallout of social media usage among youngsters. As this newspaper has highlighted earlier, there is enough scientific literature that links unrestricted social media access and usage to serious mental and physical health fallouts among adolescents, including arrested cognitive development, depression, diminished capacity for socialising, anger management, and higher health risks from lack of exercise. And whatever existing self-regulation platforms plead is conspicuous in its failure as an instrument to curb such outcomes, given how it is a drag on platforms' models for profiting from expanding and deepening reach. So, the debate is not so much about whether States should intervene - they should - as it is about how they should go about doing this. Any regulatory prescription will have to balance multiple objectives - checking potential harm and preserving obvious benefits of social media access and usage (especially in contexts where digital connectedness becomes an enabler for vulnerable groups), while allowing platforms space for their commercial interests. A blanket ban - as Australia has enacted for everyone under the age of 16 years - doesn't work. Easily accessible circumvention technologies and, in contexts where these can't be accessed, the risk of youngsters being pushed into darker areas of the internet or turning to other forms of digital addiction, render this option ineffective. Against such a backdrop, it is only pragmatic that the Centre is not considering a ban, as the IT ministry official told HT. Any proposed regulation here would need a three-pronged approach. One, technological solutions for age-verification need to be deployed, but with robust, legislated safeguards for the safety of users/guardians' data, privacy, and preventing surveillance and profiling. Two, as a corollary of this, the State must assume significant monitoring responsibilities, to ensure that social media companies toe the line. Three, active and informed parental supervision needs to be facilitated wherever possible and technological alternatives for the detection of potentially harmful usage can be deployed elsewhere. Such a framework may not be easy, but it is what is needed....