Supreme Court address a parental anxiety: How to keep the Internet safe for children | Explained

The story so far: A Supreme Court judgment on October 15 addressed the everyday anxiety of parents, who are torn between allowing their children access to the Internet and the need to keep them safe from vile, abusive online content.

The judgment by a Bench of Justices J.B. Pardiwala and K. Vinod Chandran reasons that the solution is not to ban children from using the Internet, but to take measures to keep them safe from exploitation by predators lurking online. The court declared that a child, like any other individual, has a fundamental right to access and use the Internet.

The court said the Internet is a marketplace of ideas, creative expression and information. Its value is priceless, not only for information. For children in remote areas, the Internet is often the only source of learning and information. Likewise, for children with special needs, the Internet is often the only place where they are able to find company in others like them

The State, lawmakers and parents cannot blame children for the presence of Child Sexual Exploitative and Abuse Material (CSEAM) on the Internet. The wrongdoer is the person who creates, circulates, sells or seeks out such material, and the intermediary which fails to detect and remove the content. To keep the child away from the Internet on account of such failures would be to mistake the victim for the problem.

Any measure for the safety of children must be directed at the harmful material and those responsible for the same, and not at the children themselves.

The court held that “our children are entitled to both safety and the freedom to access the Internet”. To deny them the freedom to go online would be as absurd as saying children below a certain age did not have a conscience worth protecting or a freedom of speech worth expressing.

What led to the judgment

The court found that its directions for online child safety in a September 23, 2024 judgment in a petition filed by Justice Rights for Children Alliance were largely ignored for the past two years, leading to serious lapses.

The court said there had been an “alarming increase” in child sexual exploitation and CSEAM circulated on social media platforms. It flagged how indirect links to such harmful material were promoted and shared through social media algorithms to bypass the rigours of the special penal provisions designed for the protection of children within cyberspace.

“Links to view child pornography were circulated and sold for anywhere between Rs. 40 to Rs. 5,000”. The court described the state of affairs as a “disquieting failure” on part of online platforms. Due diligence would have meant not only removal of child pornographic content but also making an immediate report of the illegal content to the police under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act.