The Supreme Court has taken serious note of lapses by social media platforms in curbing sexually explicit visual content depicting minors and directed that every intermediary must ensure that no such material, having the propensity to harm children, is offered, hosted, uploaded or promoted through a paywall or subscription, either directly or indirectly.
A Bench of Justices J. B. Pardiwala and K. “Despite more than two years having gone by since our judgement, it appears that there has been no progress worth the name.
Vinod Chandran said that the court has repeatedly flagged non-compliance with its directions issued in 2024 by the social media intermediaries and platforms, but no action has been taken. It said that the court had flagged how indirect links to such harmful material were being promoted and shared through social media algorithms to bypass the rigours of the special penal provisions designed for the protection of children within cyberspace, namely Sections 15 and 67B of the POCSO Act and the IT Act, respectively. If anything, the recent news reports instead reveal an even more unsettling reality when it comes to the safety and well-being of our children,” it said on October 15, while adding that the court was deeply saddened to note the news reports placed before it.
Issuing a slew of directions, the Bench said due to the lack of any earnest initiative shown on the part of either the regulatory authorities or the social media intermediaries for all these years, the court was left with no choice but to take matters in its own hands.
“Every intermediary must ensure that no CSEAM (Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse Material), or any other material having the propensity or likelihood to harm children, is offered, hosted, uploaded, promoted or circulated through such paywall or subscription, either directly or indirectly,” the Bench said. “We cannot emphasise this enough that there can be no space for non-consensual, sexually exploitative and abusive material on the internet, particularly on platforms that are readily accessible to the most impressionable and vulnerable of our society,” it said and directed that a workable framework for a safer future for the children be put in place.
They move to other platforms and websites that are unregulated and even more unsafe, it said, adding that keeping children away from social media platforms would, by no stretch of imagination, reduce incidents such as those revealed in the news report placed before us. Because the law prohibits them from doing so, and they continue to use the same, albeit without the knowledge of their parents or the authorities, the Court said that children do not cease to use the internet merely.
