Social media addiction NEW EPIDEMIC SWEEPING YOUNG INDIA

Monitors of India's laggard K-12 education system are almost unanimous that India, which hosts the world's largest child population of 350 million under 15 years of age, has a snowballing problem of rising social media addiction among children, especially urban adolescents

- BAISHALI MUKHERJEE

• OCTOBER 24, 2023. A group of 33 US states including California and New York sued Meta Platforms Inc, which owns Facebook and Instagram, for harming children and young people's mental health by deliberately designing features on Instagram and Facebook that are addictive for children.

• MAY 16, 2024. The European Union opened a new investigation into Meta's Facebook and Instagram for failing to protect children attracted to their platforms, a violation that could result in fines of up to 6 percent of the company's annual worldwide revenue.

• JUNE 24, 2024. Lawsuits were filed by 45 US states against Meta for not doing enough to keep children safe online. The lawsuits alleged that Meta knew that millions of children under 13 years of age are hooked on Facebook and Instagram but did nothing to deter them.

• OCTOBER 8, 2024. A bipartisan group of 14 attorneys general across the US filed lawsuits against TikTok, the short-form video social media app owned by Chinese company ByteDance, alleging that the platform has "addicted" young people and harmed their mental health.

Over the past two years, the evidence against pervasive social media — Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat, Reddit, X, Instagram, and TikTok — for visiting havoc on children and adolescents' mental health has grown into a mountain difficult to ignore. Social media platforms are accused of hooking and addicting children especially adolescents, through clever algorithms designed to keep them engaged for "as long as possible," endangering their mental health; surreptitiously collecting personal data and wilfully failing to protect them against cyberbullying.