IN a rambling conversation this week, another parent and I shared concerns about how to raise children in an era of climate change, resource scarcity, zero-sum competitiveness and war. We focused on things we could control and action to benefit our children. That’s when it transpired that the other parent, a father of three aged between eight and 12, still had not activated parental controls on any mobile device or online app.

Awareness that unfettered social media and internet access poses material dangers to children is growing, though the conversation is still nascent in Pakistan. The UK this week passed an Online Safety Act that increases protections by requiring social media companies, gaming sites and search platforms to prevent users, particularly children, from accessing harmful content such as that promoting suicide or self-harm and pornographic, racist or misogynist content. Requirements include stronger controls for verifying users’ age to changing algorithms to ensure less horrific content is pushed to children.

The law is overdue given the extent of youth social media and internet usage: the UK’s communications regulator reports that eight- to 17-year-olds spend between two and five hours online per day; most children over 12 years old (and one quarter of five- to seven-year-olds!) have a mobile phone; and 59 per cent of 13- to 17-year-olds will have seen ‘potentially harmful content’ online over the past month.

Equivalent statistics for Pakistan are not readily available, though can be extrapolated. Sixty-five per cent of the 111 million internet users in Pakistan use at least one social media platform, with YouTube and Facebook the most popular. Recent academic studies indicate that most children access social media platforms through their parents’ and peers’ devices, so one can assume that among middle- and upper-class Pakistanis social media, gaming and internet access is similar to that in the UK. (There is, of course, the converse problem in our country that millions of children on the wrong side of the digital divide remain cut off from digital technologies.)

Debate on too much screen time is still nascent in Pakistan.

The pitfalls of too much screen time include reduced focus and learning outcomes, weakened language and social skills, increased body image concerns and heightened anxiety and depression. While academic studies on the impact of social media/ internet use on children unleash questions about causation and correlation, there is growing consensus that more screen time leads to worse youth mental health, poor sleep, weak educational attainment and disruptive behaviour. Teachers report that children who manage relationships through emojis and filters are incapable of understanding social cues, arguing productively or resolving conflicts.

And this is where online safety links back to global uncertainty and our age of aggression. By raising children who are prone to anxiety and depression, who lack the ability to engage or think critically, and who have normalised isolation, we are creating future generations vulnerable to disinformation, manipulation, political polarisation and with a default resort to violence. This is how societies degrade.

Pakistan has seen its share of legislation aimed at promoting online safety, such as Peca and the proposed e-Safety Bill. These, however, compromise digital privacy and privilege citizen surveillance rather than meaningfully promote online safety. Blasphemous and pornographic content are held up to justify these laws, but with little achieved in the way of meaningful content moderation while balancing issues of access to information and free speech.

This brings us back to those who remain the most effective promoters of children’s online safety. But here too, there are gaps, and not just in the form of parents who have neglected to activate available parental controls. A 2023 study by Sana Ali and Saadia Pasha published in the Pakistan Journal of Psychological Research indicates that there is a parental obsession with children being exposed to ‘indecent’ content, with little regard for arguably more urgent issues such as poor social development, learning loss, misinformation access, cyberbullying and mental health. Parents may be policing porn but they’re not saving their offspring from losing their childhoods to the ravages of screen time.

We must shift the emphasis from state policing to citizen empowerment. This means more digital literacy for adults and children and less moralistic furore around ‘indecent’ content to a broader conversation about the linkages between social media and internet use with mental health, social functioning, safety, empowerment and democracy. Regu­lation and bans will take us only so far — the answer lies in engagement, empathy and critical thinking.

The writer is a political and integrity risk analyst.

X: *@humayusuf*

Published in Dawn, April 28th, 2025