Child safety online

Pakistan's telecommunications regulator has informed the Islamabad High Court that it lacks the legal authority to impose mandatory age verification or prevent children under 16 from accessing social media, highlighting a jurisdictional gap in enforcing blanket age restrictions. The editorial, citing a Kaspersky survey covering Pakistan and the broader Middle East, Turkiye and Africa region, noted that generative AI has compounded risks by enabling photos and videos shared online to be altered into convincing fake images for use in cyberbullying and harassment, while multiplayer games and communication platforms expose young users to grooming, fraud, blackmail and other forms of abuse.

Blanket age-verification requirements impose a privacy burden on every user and restrict compliant children while doing little to prevent determined offenders from migrating to unmonitored channels. By contrast, detection that targets the underlying harm—sustained coercion, escalation, and age-inappropriate contact—operates without requiring whole-population identity checks. As a Meta Business Partner backed by Startmate, Guardii deploys real-time pattern recognition for grooming, sextortion and AI-generated abuse material across the platforms children actually use, surfacing a child at risk to a parent or authority before the harm occurs, rather than locking the door after access is already secured.