Safety by design

IN a Los Angeles courtroom, Kaley G.M., 20, described a childhood consumed by social media. She began using YouTube at six and Instagram at nine. On one occasion, she said, she spent 16 hours on Instagram. By 10, she had uploaded 240 videos and created nine other accounts to like and comment on. She told jurors that the platforms disrupted her sleep, education and friendships, and worsened anxiety, depression and body-image problems.

Meta and Google argued that her difficulties had other causes, including bullying and a troubled home life. Her lawyers instead focused on platform design: autoplay, infinite feeds and notifications intended to keep users engaged. After more than 40 hours of deliberations, the jury found both companies negligent.

What made the verdict historic was that it emerged from the first US jury trial of its kind, holding the companies responsible not for material posted by users, but for the design and operation of the platforms themselves.

Kaley’s case was not an isolated tragedy. In 2024, Mark Zuckerberg was confronted in the US Senate by parents holding photographs of children who had died after being exploited or harmed online. Turning towards them, he apologised.

The harms extend far beyond addiction. Social media gives predators direct access to children, allowing grooming, sexual exploitation and sextortion to begin through a message, a compliment or a fake friendship. Children are also exposed to cyberbullying, self-harm content, violent material and impossible standards of beauty. Sleep, education and real relationships are displaced by endless scrolling.

The danger is not simply that children see harmful content. It is that the platforms are built to keep them there.

The danger is not simply that children see harmful content. It is that the platforms are built to keep them there.

Yet the platforms have known about these dangers for years. Their response has been moderation, reporting tools, parental controls and age limits. It has failed. Harmful material continues to slip through, predators return under new accounts, and children routinely bypass age restrictions.

The failure is increasingly difficult to disguise.

In 2024, the US Federal Trade Commission found that major platforms had failed to provide adequate safeguards for children and teenagers.

In 2026, European regulators preliminarily found that Meta had failed to stop children under 13 from using Instagram and Facebook, while Ofcom reported that 73 per cent of UK children aged 11 to 17 had encountered at least one form of harmful content online in the preceding four weeks. Platform accountability has delivered promises after scandal, rather than protection before harm.

This record has pushed governments towards prohibition. Australia became the first country to require platforms to take reasonable steps to prevent children under 16 from holding accounts. The rules took effect in December 2025. Britain has since announced plans for a similar measure, expected to come into force in spring 2027, alongside restrictions on livestreaming and contact between children and strangers.

Pakistan is moving in the same direction. A resolution submitted to the Punjab Assembly seeks a nationwide restriction on social media accounts for children under 16 without verified parental consent. It asks the federal government to legislate, the PTA to enforce age checks and platforms to remove harmful content more quickly.

A ban offers a simple answer to a frightening problem. Its political value, however, may be greater than its protective value. It allows governments to appear decisive while avoiding the harder work of enforcement, platform accountability and sustained child protection.

Pakistan’s economic, linguistic and administrative inequalities make it difficult to enforce any uniform age-verification system fairly. Identity checks, facial-age estimation and parental verification could create new privacy and exclusion risks. Children may still bypass the system by entering a false date of birth or using an adult’s account.

Even stronger regulatory systems are struggling. In July 2026, researchers created 50 Australian accounts declaring their users to be exactly 16. None was asked to verify that claim. The test did not prove that openly underage users could register, but showed how heavily enforcement depends on platforms identifying false ages and deciding when verification is necessary.

A blanket restriction may also give parents a false sense of security. Once assured that children cannot use Instagram or TikTok, families may assume that the danger has disappeared. In reality, children may simply move into less visible spaces, including WhatsApp and Telegram groups, Discord servers, gaming communities and platforms such as Roblox. The risk does not disappear. It becomes harder to see.

Education must therefore be part of the response. The government should invest in sustained digital-safety programmes for parents, teachers and children, helping families recognise grooming, sextortion, cyberbullying and compulsive use, and understand where to seek help. Parents cannot protect children from risks they have never been taught to identify.

Pakistan therefore needs something more demanding than a ban. Platforms should be req­u­ired to make children’s accounts private by def­ault, limit contact from strangers, prohibit behavioural advertising to minors, redesign recommendation systems and respond rapidly to grooming and sexual exploitation. Reporting and parental-control tools must work in Urdu and regional languages, while independent audits should test whether these protections actually work.

Pakistan can build on its contribution to global cyber governance. It supported a legally binding UN Convention against Cybercrime and participated actively in negotiations on capacity building, technology transfer and international cooperation. The convention is not a platform-accountability framework, but Pakistan’s involvement shows that it can help shape global digital rules rather than merely receive them.

The more relevant opportunity lies in the Global Digital Compact. It calls for a safer digital environment for children and for platform policies on online child sexual exploitation and abuse to be monitored and reviewed. Pakistan should use this forum, together with other developing countries, to demand common safety standards, greater transparency and meaningful consequences for companies that repeatedly fail children.

The goal should not be to pretend that children can be removed from the digital world. It should be to make the digital world answerable for what it does to them.

The writer is the founder of Media Matters for Democracy.

Published in Dawn, July 19th, 2026 ...