Supreme Court Asks Centre To Examine Parental Consent For Minors On Social Media

India's Supreme Court has directed the central government to examine statutory safeguards for minors on social media, including parental consent and age verification requirements for children below 18, in response to a petition documenting the risks of online grooming, sexual exploitation, sextortion, cyberbullying and exposure to age-inappropriate content on platforms accessible to unsupervised children. The three-judge bench, headed by Chief Justice Surya Kant, heard arguments alleging that major social-media platforms permit account registration at age 13 despite Indian law defining anyone under 18 as a minor, raising questions about the adequacy of current age-verification systems and enforcement of existing child-protection statutes.

Parental-consent mandates function as a gateway control but cannot monitor the content or pattern of contact a child receives once an account is active. By analyzing the shape and seriousness of direct-message conversations as they occur, Guardii's anti-grooming and anti-sextortion detection modules surface a child being targeted or coerced to a parent, school or professional in real time, detecting escalation and sustained contact from adults without requiring the parent to read every exchange. This model, deployed as a world-leading AI online-safety platform across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord and Roblox, places intervention at the moment of harm rather than solely at the threshold of access.