The Manufacture of India's Social Media law

The Agenda behind an Apology

Arvind

arvindvelmurugan121003@gmail.com

Is India's next social media law being scripted in a viral apology video?

A teenager shouts abusive slogans at a protest. A video goes viral. The Prime Minister forgives her, on camera. Her mother, grateful and shaken, goes on national television and asks him for something specific: ban Instagram and Facebook for everyone under twenty. Not eighteen - the age at which Indian law already recognizes a citizen as an adult, capable of voting, marrying, and standing trial as one. Twenty.

It is a moving human moment. It may also be something else entirely: the opening scene of a legislative script.

Why 18 to 20? The Age Bracket Doing the Political Heavy Lifting

Every country moving toward a social media age restriction right now has converged on roughly the same number, and it isn't twenty. Australia's world-first ban, in force since December 2025, cuts off access at 16. France and Denmark have settled on 15. Norway is legislating an absolute limit of 15. Malaysia has gone with 16. Germany's ruling conservatives are debating 16. Britain is weighing an "Australia-style" ban, also pegged to 16.

The global instinct, in other words, is to protect children - a category that ends, almost everywhere, well before adulthood begins. India's viral mother is not asking for that. She is asking to extend "childhood," for regulatory purposes, two full years past the age at which the Constitution & the specific statute of Indian Majority Act,1875 already treats a person as fully responsible for their own choices, their own vote, and their own crimes. As such the same is not a child-safety bracket. It is a young-adult-speech bracket - and it happens to capture precisely the demography most active in student protests, most online, and most capable of organizing politically without institutional permission.

Ask yourself: if this were truly about screen addiction and mental health among children, why does the number stop just short of the age at which a citizen can legally challenge the government that is proposing to silence them? The same ought further to be viewed in light of an explicit constitutional amendment (61st Constitutional amendment Act,1988) which lowered the age for voting from 21 yrs to 18 yrs, an act which in many ways fortified the age of 18 as a sufficient age for maturity & majority to set in . If the same is law is passed , considering the hitherto practices of the government , it would not be a surprise , if the government passes another Constitutional amendment not only restoring the original position but overriding the Indian majority act,1875 & raising the legal age for all purposes to 20 or 21 years, just to give effect to the law.

The Australia Template, Minus the Australia Number

Governments rarely invent policy instruments from scratch; they borrow scaffolding that has already survived public scrutiny elsewhere and graft it onto their own justification (India has a rich history of doing the same , the most prominent of it all being the supreme law of the land : The Constitution , itself). Australia gave the world a template: platform-level age verification, steep corporate penalties, bipartisan cover, and a "protecting our children" framing that is very difficult for any opposition to vote against without looking indifferent to child welfare. That template is now travelling - to Denmark, Norway, Malaysia, Britain, and, if the current trajectory holds, to India.

What is instructive is how the number changes as the template moves. Australia protects under-16s. India's emerging public pressure protects - or restrains - under-20s. This proves that while the Templates travel; brackets don't necessarily have to.

Manufacturing the General Will

Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that a law is only legitimate when it expresses the general will - not the sum of individual private interests, but the genuine, collective will of a people acting as a body politic. A wise government does not need to manufacture consent for a just law; the people 'WILL' it themselves.

But the general will can also be 'performed/be performative'. A single, emotionally overwhelming moment - a forgiven teenager, a grateful mother, a Prime Minister's magnanimity broadcast - is not the general will. It is one family's testimony, amplified by algorithmic virality and state media coverage, standing in for a national consensus that has not actually been tested, debated, or voted on. When a government allows (or encourages) a single viral moment to circulate as though it were the voice of the nation, it is not discovering the general will. It is manufacturing its appearance, which is merely a facade.

The Inversion of 'Ehrlich's Living Law'

The jurist Eugen Ehrlich argued something that ought to unsettle anyone watching this unfold: that the real law of a society is never found only in statute books, but in the "living law" - the actual norms, habits, and inner order that people follow in their daily lives, which the state merely formalizes later. Ehrlich's insight was meant to be a check on state power: legitimate law grows up from society; it is not imposed down onto it in the 'REVERSE'.

What we may be witnessing here is Ehrlich's theory used as camouflage rather than constraint. A single family's plea is being treated/in the horizon of being treated, in real time, as though it already is the living law of the nation - a spontaneous social fact requiring only the state's formal seal. But one mother's grief is not a social norm. It is being positioned as one, so that when the bill eventually arrives in Parliament, it can be presented not as a state imposition but as something the people themselves had already willed into being. This act would be nothing but, Ehrlich's logic, borrowed and reversed: not law rising from society, but a state narrative descending and calling itself society's voice.

Manufacturing Consent, Contemporary Edition

Antonio Gramsci wrote of cultural hegemony - the way ruling power secures consent not through force but by making its preferred order feel like common sense, the use of cultural consent rather than physical force to maintain dominance (The PM's linking of the act to that of cultural shock - 'How can our daughters use such expletives). Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, decades later, described the machinery of manufacturing consent: how media ecosystems, even in open societies, can filter and amplify precisely the stories that make a predetermined policy outcome feel inevitable and self-evidently reasonable before a single line of legislation is drafted.

Watch the sequence here: a viral abuse video, a Prime Ministerial video of forgiveness, a grateful mother's television appeal, wall-to-wall coverage of her gratitude - and, quietly, at the centre of it, a specific policy demand that no one in government had to say out loud themselves. By the time a social media age-restriction bill is tabled, it will not look like a state clampdown on youth political expression. It will look like something the nation asked for.

Questions Worth Sitting With

* If protecting minors were truly the goal, why does the proposed bracket end two years past legal adulthood? And most importantly, the existence of the possibility of it being raised by another year as well i.e., 21 years

* Why does a policy demand of this specificity - platform names, an exact age, a protest ban - emerge fully formed from a private citizen's gratitude, rather than from a committee, a white paper, or a public consultation?

* Is it a coincidence that the age bracket being floated corresponds almost exactly to the demography most visible at protests like the one that started this entire episode?

* And if a law like this does arrive, will India be legislating child protection - or will it be legislating the political silence/shush of its most restless age group, wrapped in the language of a mother's love?

Rousseau warned that the general will could be corrupted by factions and manipulation. Ehrlich warned that living law could be counterfeited by those who mistake - or misrepresent - a single loud voice for the norm of a whole society. Both warnings feel, this week, less like eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theory, and more like a description of what is happening in real time on our phones.

(To be fair to the family at the centre of this story: their appeal may well be entirely sincere, born of a genuinely frightening encounter with the law and a mother's fear for her child. Sincerity and strategic utility are not mutually exclusive - a government does not need to script a mother's grief to benefit from it. The question this piece raises is not about her motives. It is about what happens next, and who decides to act on what she said.)

(The author is pursing LLM at Tamil Nadu National Law Univesity)