The government should consider introducing an age limit on social media use, the Supreme Court has said.
Bangalore:
The Karnataka High Court today observed that it would be appropriate if an age limit was introduced for the use of social media, similar to the legal age for drinking alcohol.
A division bench of Justices G Narendar and Vijaykumar A Patil made this observation while hearing an appeal by had rejected. Technology (MeiTY).
MeTY had issued 10 government orders under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act between February 2, 2021 and February 28, 2022 directing it to block 1,474 accounts, 175 tweets, 256 URLs and one hashtag. Twitter has challenged the orders regarding 39 of these URLs.
“Ban social media. Let me tell you, a lot of good will come out of it. Today’s school going children are so addicted to it. I think there should be an age limit like in the excise rules,” Justice G. Narendar observed on.
The court further noted that “children can be 17 or 18 years old. But do they have the maturity to judge what is or is not in the best interest of the nation? Not only on social media, even on the internet things need to be deleted, it corrupts. The government should consider introducing an age limit for using social media.”
The court had also imposed a penalty of Rs 50 lakh on X Corp. X Corp’s counsel argued that MeiTY had not informed users about the blocking of their tweets and accounts and that the company was even prohibited from informing them.
The Supreme Court asked the government: “You are not disclosing the order. He is not allowed to divulge the order. How is he going to defend himself?”
The Supreme Court suggested that the government may need to tweak the rules a bit because it is at the government’s discretion for X Corp to block users’ accounts and the company cannot be left alone.
However, the Supreme Court said: “When it comes to national security, everyone must be on the same page.” When the company’s counsel argued that it had communicated which MeITY orders it could and could not comply with, the court said X Corp cannot be the judge.
The court said X Corp “cannot be given the right to review the content. If the content says, ‘Apple keeps the doctor away,’ do you interpret that as against the doctor and in the interest of the nation?”
The hearing of the case has been postponed until Wednesday, when the Supreme Court will decide on the interim relief sought by X Corp. The appeal will then be heard, the court said.
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