Meta Adds Parental Control To Threads In India Amid Child Safety Concerns

Meta is rolling out parental supervision on Threads in India, giving parents greater control over how teenagers use the platform, as the company faces growing scrutiny over child safety, content moderation, and the circulation of child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

The rollout is part of Meta's wider Asia-Pacific expansion of parental supervision on Threads. 

Through Family Center, parents and guardians will be able to see how much time their teenager spends on Threads, set daily limits, block access during specified hours, adjust Sleep Mode, manage who can tag their child and control certain privacy and sensitive-content settings.

The timing is significant. In India, Meta's child-safety measures are emerging alongside a wider government push over how the company moderates content, uses recommendation algorithms and meets its obligations as an intermediary.

The government and Meta have held multiple rounds of discussions on content moderation, human review, recommendation systems, deepfakes and safe-harbour protections. Officials have questioned whether a platform can continue to rely on intermediary protections when its algorithms actively recommend and amplify content. The government has also pushed for greater human intervention and moderators with an understanding of Indian languages and local context.

Child safety has become a particularly important part of the engagement.

Meta has agreed to report child-safety matters directly to India's cybercrime authorities through the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C), following the government's push for platforms to take more proactive steps against harmful material.

The issue sits alongside existing obligations under India's intermediary rules and the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, or POCSO. The regulatory question is no longer limited to whether a platform removes illegal material once it is reported. It increasingly concerns how platforms detect such material, how quickly they act, and whether their own systems contribute to its distribution.

Meta is also facing a separate but related child-safety reckoning in the US.

In August, the company agreed to a $17 million settlement with 47 US states over allegations concerning the design and operation of its platforms and their impact on young users. The settlement includes measures around teenagers' use of the services, parental controls, age assurance and protections against harmful content.

US measures have focused heavily on how teenagers use Meta's products, including screen time, parental controls and age assurance. India's emerging framework combines those product-level questions with a separate focus on children's personal data and unlawful content.

That distinction matters as India implements the Digital Personal Data Protection framework. The regime requires verifiable parental consent for processing children's personal data and places restrictions on targeted advertising, behavioural monitoring and profiling of children. But it also creates a difficult question for platforms: they need to know whether a user is a child to apply child-specific protections, while age verification itself can involve collecting additional personal information.

This makes Meta's latest Threads controls only one part of a much larger regulatory shift.

The older framework largely revolved around intermediary due diligence, removal of unlawful content and the conditions for retaining safe-harbour protection. The newer regime adds stronger requirements around children's data, while the government's engagement with Meta is pushing the company towards more direct cooperation with Indian law enforcement on child-safety cases.

Meta's product changes add another layer: safety by design. But parental controls cannot by themselves address CSAM or questions around recommendation algorithms, the government has said. "Limiting screen time, controlling tags and restricting sensitive content are different from detecting, reporting and preventing the spread of unlawful material," an official said.