The Supreme Court has said that every citizen, including children, has a fundamental right to use the internet.
“To deny the same altogether would be as absurd as saying children below a certain age do not have a conscience worth protecting or a freedom of speech worth expressing,” said a bench of Justices JB Pardiwala and K Vinod Chandran in an order passed on Thursday.
The bench was hearing a petition alleging that social media platforms were failing to meet their legal obligations to report child sexual exploitation and abuse material to the authorities.
In its judgement, the court deliberated whether children should be completely shielded from the internet and social media platforms.
However, it pointed out that children's safety and freedom were not at odds. “Our children are entitled to both,” the court noted.
The observations came months after the BBC reported that it had found that social media platform Instagram, which is owned by Meta, had been running paid advertisements that promote child sexual abuse material in India.
Publishing or transmitting child sexual abuse material is illegal and constitutes a serious criminal offence under the 2000 Information Technology Act and the 2012 Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act.
The advertisements use phrases such as “rape video” and “child video”, and direct...