IS SOCIAL MEDIA DEFINING SELF-WORTH?

THE CONTEXT: The tragic suicide of a young entrepreneur over declining social media followers has reignited debate on the pervasive influence of social media on youth identity, mental health, and societal values in India. With over 700 million internet users and the world’s largest youth population, India faces a unique challenge: harnessing the benefits of digital platforms while mitigating their psychological and ethical risks.

CURRENT SCENARIO – DATA POINTS

• • Digital ubiquity: 886 million active internet users (ICUBE 2024); >61 % of them are on at least one social platform.
  • Adolescent footprint: 76 % of rural teens (14‑- 16 yrs) use phones chiefly for social media (ASER 2024).
  • Mental‑health signals
    • Suicides per lakh rose from 12.0 (2021)  to 12.4 (2022); adolescent self-harm linked to ‘problematic use’ now ≥13 % in the WHO‑Europe study.
    • NIMHANS’ NMHS‑2 pilot (2024) reports 1‑in‑4 urban adolescents meeting criteria for body‑image distress.

 INDIAN POLICY & INSTITUTIONAL FRAMEWORK

Instrument	Salient Provisions	Gaps Observed
IT (Intermediary Guidelines & Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 – updated 2023	“Significant social media intermediary” (>5 million users) must appoint grievance officer, enable traceability, remove harmful content within 24 h	No algorithmic transparency mandate yet; children’s design code absent.
National Suicide Prevention Strategy 2022	10 % suicide mortality reduction target by 2030; calls for digital platform partnership in early warning systems	The implementation roadmap with social media APIs is still evolving.
Tele MANAS	53 tele mental health cells; 24×7 toll free 14416; 1.9 m calls handled	School linkages and social media referrals are rudimentary.
MANODARPAN & CBSE Digital Wellness Circulars (Apr 2025)	Weekly EI webinars; protocol for reporting cyber bullying	Mostly urban private school reach.
NCPCR Guidelines 2024 on Bullying & Child Influencers	Mandatory parental consent, earnings in escrow, algorithmic “take a break” prompts	Enforcement capacity thin across states.

GLOBAL BENCHMARKS

• • EU Digital Services Act 2024 – risk audits & opt‑out of profiling for minors.
  • US Surgeon‑General Advisory 2023 – proposes tobacco‑style warning labels on social apps.
  • UK Age‑Appropriate Design Code – default high privacy for under‑18; inspiration for NCPCR draft code.

CHALLENGES ARISING FROM SOCIAL‑MEDIA‑DRIVEN IDENTITY STRESS:

Algorithmic Amplification of Idealised Selves

• • Engagement-maximising recommender systems on large social media platforms consistently promote content that depicts highly curated successes and “perfect” appearances, thereby encouraging upward social comparison and attitude polarization.
  • A field study published in the International Journal of Indian Psychology (IJIP) reported a statistically significant positive correlation between the duration of daily social‑media use and an individual’s propensity for social comparison, while also recording a negative correlation with subjective well-being.
  • The Surgeon‑General of the United States noted in a 2023 advisory that adolescents who spend more than three hours per day on social media are almost twice as likely to exhibit symptoms of depression.
  • The Vision India Foundation’s security brief of March 2025 warned policymakers that algorithm-driven echo chambers can incubate extremist views, a phenomenon it described as “algorithmic radicalisation.”

Body Dysmorphia and Eating Disorders

• • Continuous exposure to heavily edited images fosters internalised appearance ideals that are often unattainable and may precipitate body‑image disorders.
  • Findings from the second National Mental Health Survey (NMHS‑2) pilot conducted by the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro‑Sciences (NIMHANS) in 2024 indicated that one in four urban adolescents meets the clinical threshold for body‑image distress.
  • A meta-analysis in The Lancet Digital Health (2023) linked more than four hours of daily Instagram use with a seventy‑per‑cent higher likelihood of disordered eating patterns.
  • The Rashtriya Kishor Swasthya Karyakram (RKSK) still lacks a screen‑time or digital body‑image module, reflecting a notable policy gap in adolescent health programming.
  • The Consumer Protection (Advertising) Rules 2022 prohibit misleading health claims, yet enforcement remains inconsistent.

Parental Surveillance versus Trust Deficit

• • Highly intrusive monitoring strategies, such as reading private messages, frequently push adolescents to create hidden or secondary accounts, colloquially called “Finsta” accounts, thereby eroding open communication.
  • A 2024 joint survey by the University of Oxford and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) across fourteen Indian secondary schools found that learners subjected to intensive parental surveillance were more than twice as likely to maintain such hidden profiles.
  • UNICEF’s Digital Parenting toolkit cautions that excessive surveillance undermines mutual trust and inhibits the development of adolescents’ self‑regulation skills.
  • The National Education Policy 2020 encourages schools to integrate “digital civics” and life‑skills education, thereby promoting dialogue‑based rather than command‑and‑control parenting styles.

Legal Grey Zones in the Digital Ecosystem

• • The emerging “child influencer” economy is only partially regulated; the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) circulated a 2024 draft guideline proposing that twenty per cent of a child influencer’s earnings be placed in escrow and that daily work hours be capped at three, but this has not yet been codified.
  • Deep‑fake technology has accelerated identity fraud; the 2025 Identity Fraud Report estimated an attempt every five minutes, with deep fakes constituting forty per cent of biometric fraud cases.
  • The Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 provides for redress against harmful processing but does not specify time‑bound takedown obligations for synthetic media.

Digital Divide in Access to Mental‑Health Support

• • The Tele‑Mental Health Assistance and Networking Across States (Tele‑MANAS) initiative recorded more than two million calls by April 2025, but a rapid assessment by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) revealed that only twenty‑two per cent of these originated in tier‑three districts.
  • A 2024 article in the Indian Journal of Social Psychiatry highlighted a treatment gap exceeding seventy per cent in rural areas, compounded by a national psychiatrist ratio of fewer than 0.75 per 100,000 population.
  • Section 18, subsection 1, of the Mental Healthcare Act 2017 guarantees the right to affordable and quality mental‑health care, yet geo‑spatial analysis demonstrates that eighty per cent of Tele‑MANAS call centres are situated in state capitals.
  • The National Tele‑Mental Health Programme (NTMHP) received an allocation of two hundred and thirty crore rupees for the period 2022 to 2025, but utilisation has disproportionately favoured urban clusters.
  • Addressing the mental‑health digital divide is integral to fulfilling Sustainable Development Goal 3.4, which targets the reduction of mortality from non‑communicable diseases and the promotion of mental health and well‑being.

THE WAY FORWARD:

Create an Algorithmic Accountability Sandbox within the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).

• • The sandbox would oblige every social‑media platform that has more than twenty‑million active users in India to submit its recommendation engines to independent “bias and harm” audits twice a year.
  • The proposal is consistent with Rule 10 of the draft Digital Personal Data Protection Rules 2025, which already envisages “algorithmic due diligence,” and with the civil‑society recommendations submitted to MeitY in February 2025 by the Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Policy.
  • The European Union Digital Services Act subjects “Very Large Online Platforms” to systemic‑risk audits; India can adapt this model while retaining constitutional safeguards for freedom of speech.

Embed a Digital Well‑being Index in the forthcoming seventh round of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS‑7).

• • Alongside nutrition, sanitation and anaemia, enumerators would gather data on average screen‑time, cyber‑bullying exposure and platform‑induced stress‑indicators (for example, sleep disruption).
  • The structure can draw on the Global Digital Well-being Index 2024, which offers validated items for psychological, social, and economic well-being online.

  Upgrade the Tele‑Mental Health Assistance and Networking Across States (Tele‑MANAS) programme to Version 2.0.

• • The upgrade would integrate a WhatsApp‑based chatbot capable of triaging callers in twenty‑two scheduled languages; complex cases would still be escalated to clinical psychologists.
  • Tele‑MANAS has already handled more than two‑million calls across fifty‑three centres as of April 2025.
  • A vernacular artificial‑intelligence triage will operationalise the ethical principles of accessibility and beneficence, especially for tier‑three districts that currently account for only twenty‑two per cent of calls.

 Institutionalise a School‑Level Screen‑Time Budget Ledger and Digital Ethics Curriculum.

• • Every learner from Class VI upward would record daily on‑screen hours—academic and recreational—in a ledger countersigned each quarter by a counsellor, thereby fostering self‑regulation (an Emotional Intelligence competency) rather than parental surveillance.
  • The life‑skills block introduced under the National Education Policy 2020 already mandates training in social and emotional learning; the ledger provides an objective tool for this abstract curriculum.
  • UNICEF’s Digital Parenting toolkit stresses that dialogue‑oriented approaches outperform covert monitoring, a conclusion corroborated by the Oxford‑UNICEF survey showing that intensive surveillance doubles the likelihood of secret accounts.

  Enact a Child‑Influencer Trust Fund Act on the lines of the United States Coogan Law.

• • The statute would require that twenty per cent of every minor influencer’s income be deposited in an escrow account, accessible only upon reaching eighteen years of age, and would restrict digital “work” to three compensated hours per day.
  • The measure advances the draft guidelines circulated by the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights in 2024.
  • The Act exemplifies protective justice and fiduciary duty, recognising that platforms and parents alike owe children a higher standard of care.

Launch Panchayat‑Level Emotional Intelligence Workshops through Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHA) and Nehru Yuva Kendra Sangathan (NYKS) volunteers.

• • Community volunteers would use culturally adapted games and role‑play modules—developed in consultation with the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro‑Sciences (NIMHANS)—to teach adolescents skills of self‑awareness, empathy and prudent social‑media sharing.
  • The Annual Action Plan of NYKS already encourages collaboration with ASHA workers for health outreach; adding an emotional intelligence component leverages existing human capital at a negligible additional cost.
  • The workshops resonate with Gandhian Sarvodaya (universal uplift) and the ethical virtue of prudence, equipping youth to navigate persuasive digital architectures.

THE CONCLUSION:

The intersection of social media, youth identity, and mental health is a defining challenge of contemporary Indian society. Addressing it requires a nuanced, evidence-based, and ethically grounded approach-balancing innovation with regulation, protection with empowerment, and individual agency with collective responsibility. Only then can India nurture a resilient, creative, and ethically grounded generation, equipped to thrive in the digital age.

UPSC PAST YEAR QUESTION:

Q. The current internet expansion has instilled a different set of cultural values which are in conflict with traditional values. Discuss. 2020

MAINS PRACTICE QUESTION:

Q. The pervasive influence of social media has redefined identity formation among Indian youth, often at the cost of mental well-being and ethical values. Discuss the ethical responsibilities of social media companies and policymakers in addressing this crisis.

SOURCE:

https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/is-social-media-defining-self-worth/article69553464.ece#:~:text=Unlike%20for%20a%20lot%20of,how%20they%20form%20an%20identity.

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