India, Jan. 24 -- The Andhra Pradesh government is considering legislation to ban children under 16 years from accessing and using social media. It has formed a group of ministers to examine the existing legislative framework in the country to regulate social media platforms. The power to regulate social media and other communication intermediaries is vested in the Union government under the Seventh Schedule, but states can enact laws covering cyberspace access by citing public order necessities. So, if the Andhra Pradesh government finds the grounds to legislate a ban, it will join a growing list of jurisdictions moving towards such interventions - Australia enforced this last year, while Denmark, France, and Malaysia are considering doing this in various forms. The need to protect children from harm in cyberspace - particularly from social media - can't be overstated. Several studies have underlined the harm that social media does to young users. Experts have listed several dangers of unregulated use, from the retarding effect on physical activity to the worsening of psychosocial challenges typical among young users, specifically adolescents. These include warped identity formation and perception of the world outside, exacerbation of self-harm and bullying risks, addictive usage, and deep isolation due to unchecked use over long periods daily, stunting social and behavioural development. Over the long-term, social media harm could manifest as a large cohort of young adults who have squandered the potential of their formative years. As US court filings in a case against Meta have shown, social media companies can't always be depended upon to correct this scenario. They have either minimised potential harm in their narratives or have denied this outright. In this light, there may be a case for State intervention. But it is not clear whether a ban by itself can be an effective and practical response to the challenge. To illustrate, Australia's ban puts the onus of compliance on social media companies, calling upon them to use multiple age-assurance methods, such as requiring government ID for signing up, voice and face recognition, and even "age inference" through analysis of online activity and patterns of individual users to determine the age cohort they belong to. Apart from questions on accuracy, there are several concerns about data privacy in deploying such methods. Also, sidestepping the ban is almost too easy, with escape routes such as location masking through VPN - given a ban will only cover the state, even intra-country masking can defeat the move. Administrative wherewithal can also prove a hurdle for the enforcement of the ban. Rule-making on social media use by children must consider all aspects of digital engagement.Critics of banning social media point out that this carries the risk of pushing young digital users to darker areas of the web, where the potential for harm is exponentially greater, or towards other online activities that have similar mental and physical health fallouts, such as online gaming. So, efforts to increase awareness among parents on risky online behaviour and habits of adolescents and rigorous monitoring of online activity must preface any move to ban social media for young users. There are too many avenues for online activity for a social media ban alone to drive healthy engagement. A carefully calibrated range of measures is perhaps what is needed....