Anbarasan Etharajan

It's only a proposal for now, but it taps into a growing global trend after Australia introduced a ban for under-16s. Our global affairs reporter Anbarisan Etharajan told us more. If you describe India in one word, this is where every social media company wants to go and then expand the market. Just to give you a sheer scale, India's got about 500 million YouTube users, probably the highest in the world, 400 million in Facebook and 480 million in Instagram. And as you mentioned...

The created economy is so huge where you will see very often youngsters doing real standing in railway stations, sometimes dangerously near flooded bridges and other places. So it's quite huge. Now, in the economic survey, which comes ahead of the annual budget, we see that the economic advisor is proposing

certain types of age-based restrictions, because what he called the social media companies, some of them as predatory, because they are forcing, people are getting addicted. And so he's proposing also off-screen times and also device-free hours and also like telling people to share online activities, to tell their youngsters to do all these things. I don't know how it's going to work. It didn't work in my home.

So it is basically, so he's proposing this. It gives you a glimpse of what is the thought behind this. What is the discussion going among at the highest level of the Indian government? It all comes in the wake of what Australia did. And what are the European countries like France and Britain and Denmark they are discussing. So it is a real thing that people now want to talk about putting age-based restrictions on social media, various apps.

Is there a pushback? Because it's a pretty big blow if it happened to say YouTube and Meta, isn't it? It is indeed because, you know, it's also on the one side it is the economy and the other side people are also using it for other purposes. So far we haven't heard from these Meta and other companies on this latest comment by the India's chief economic advisor. But what previously what they were saying was like if you're going to stop the youngsters from accessing Instagram or other social media apps,

That might push them towards unregulated, some of these very dangerous websites. So you are pushing them towards the dark web, and then they will try to access this information from a different area. So that is one argument from these companies. And of course, it's not going to be easy. How are you going to regulate it?

But Indian states, like even though the various state governments have their own powers, like Andhra Pradesh and Goa, they also say that they are going to have a look at it, how they are going to monitor the social media usage.