Column | Age of judicial parenting: Time to act on Supreme Court’s child safety ruling

Keeping children off social media is an understandable response to the dangers they face there. But it also leaves a question unanswered – why those dangers are allowed to persist. In its October 15 ruling in Just Rights for Children Alliance v S Harish, the Supreme Court addressed that question and observed that to exclude children because platforms have failed to deal with abuse would be to “mistake the victim for the problem”.

The court had dealt with the issue of Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse Material, or CSEAM, in September 2024. Returning to the matter more than two years later, it found “no progress worth the name”. According to a news report reproduced in the order, researchers reported 55 advertisements that ran in India. For 43, the platform responded that the advertisements did not breach its advertising standards. These were reports of suspected exploitation being assessed against standards that appeared unable to recognise it.

The court has held that children, irrespective of age, enjoy the fundamental right to access and use the internet under Article 21 (right to life and personal liberty), read with Article 19 (1)(a) (freedom of speech and expresssion). The court opined that their safety and freedom are not at odds. This, however, does not rule out age-appropriate safeguards or restrictions on inherently harmful services, such as explicit websites. It explained why excluding children altogether is no substitute for dealing with those who create, circulate and profit from abusive material.

Building the right system

Largely, the order notes a practical difficulty – removing material from one platform does not ensure its removal from another. The court, therefore, directed the Centre to create a national hash and URL database, either within the Sahyog portal or separately. A hash identifies material through its digital fingerprint; a URL identifies its online location. The database would contain these identifiers, not the abusive material itself. Platforms would check content against it alongside their existing detection systems. A match would require immediate removal, without another assessment by each platform.

However, the consequences of a mistaken entry would be considerable. Lawful content could be removed from every platform using the database, with no fresh assessment at the point of removal. The final directions therefore require at least three trained human analysts to independently determine whether material constitutes CSEAM before its identifiers are included. Automated screening may assist that assessment but cannot replace it.

The order provides safeguards against such mistakes. The authority maintaining the database must keep records of its use and arrange independent audits. If an entry is found to be wrong, it must be corrected promptly and the affected content restored. Users must also be told why their content was removed and where they can challenge the decision. If the platform made the decision itself, the complaint goes through its grievance process. If it acted on a database match, the complaint goes to the database authority. The court has expressly confined the database to detecting and removing CSEAM; it cannot be repurposed to remove other content.

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There are substantial obligations being directed to the government beyond setting up a repository. Analysts will have to be recruited and trained, access secured, and complaints against incorrect entries decided promptly. These functions need staff and funding from the outset. Otherwise, a person whose lawful content has been removed across several platforms could have a remedy on paper but little to no prospect of a timely correction.

The changes to reporting procedures are likely to be more immediately visible to users. A clearly labelled CSEAM category must be accessible within two steps of the content, profile, group or link, and the person reporting it must remain anonymous. A trained grievance officer must review the complaint, record findings and digitally sign the assessment. The complainant must receive an acknowledgement within 24 hours, a tracking number and, subsequently, a decision with reasons. Platforms must provide the staff and resources needed to carry this out.

Platforms must also report removals to the appropriate Indian authorities, including the Special Juvenile Police Unit, local police or cyber-crime portal. The order distinguishes newly identified material from material already listed in the database. For the former, a removal following a complaint must be reported as soon as the complaint is resolved, and no later than two hours afterwards. Where the platform acts on its own detection or a court or government direction, the two hours run from removal. The database authority must also be informed if it is a separate body. Removals based on database matches are covered by consolidated weekly reports to that authority. The distinction matters since these timelines concern reporting to authorities, not the time allowed for taking content down.

Receiving these reports will place demands on investigating agencies too. Implementation should, therefore, include training and technical support for the officers handling them, so that reports lead to investigation and assistance for victims. This is a practical requirement of making the framework work, rather than a separate training direction imposed by this order.

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Nor can platforms look only for explicit imagery. An advertisement may contain none, yet direct users to abusive material or promote a tool that creates it. Paragraph 165 of the order requires assessment of the whole, including text, captions, keywords, links and the function of the tool being promoted. Reviewing the image alone, without considering what the advertisement is selling or where it leads, will not be enough.

The Union has also been asked to consider a framework of monetary penalties reflecting the seriousness, duration and recurrence of failures, as well as the intermediary’s size and turnover. The order does not itself enact a schedule of fines. The government still has to develop the framework, including whether to provide for disgorgement of revenue from the misuse of paywalls.

Beyond takedowns

For platforms, compliance will involve more than revising policies and adding reporting categories. The court notes that giving complaints priority does not create the capacity to resolve them. Who will review a surge of complaints? How will reviewers be trained to recognise indirect promotion of abuse? How quickly will an incorrect decision be corrected? Those questions deserve as much attention as the number of items removed each month.

The court leaves room for parental consent and guidance, accounts that are private by default, restrictions on messages from unknown adults and a possible “child mode”. The government will also have to address the court’s concern that age-based exclusion involves collecting and monitoring sensitive information about users, with attendant risks of surveillance and misuse. Designing a workable safeguard will require attention to the information it collects, as well as the content it restricts.

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Some of the order’s most important measures concern what happens at home and in school. Paragraph 315 calls for digital safety and age-appropriate sex education in the core curriculum, training for teachers and regular awareness programmes for parents. Victims must have access to free counselling and psychological support for as long as necessary. Children must also be assured that reporting abuse will not bring blame or punishment. That assurance is harder to give if a child expects the first response to be a reprimand for having gone online.

The Centre must report its progress by affidavit when the matter returns to court on December 10 this year. Guidelines, operating procedures, and changes to the law or rules, where necessary, would follow. The value of the order will become apparent in less conspicuous places, i.e., in the handling of a complaint, the correction of a mistaken entry, or a school’s response when a child asks for help. These are responsibilities that government, platforms and educational institutions should be able to discharge without repeated reminders from the Supreme Court.

Ankoosh K Mehta is a partner (co-head, white collar & investigation) and Sarah Navodia is a principal associate at Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas.

Written by eminent law professionals, the Legal Minds Column aims to break down complex statutory frameworks into insights, both for members of the fraternity and the general public.

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