Policy work beyond technological moral panic

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Last month, a colleague and I filed a submission to the Government of Karnataka in response to a draft policy on minors’ use of digital devices. While child protection and children’s digital rights have never been my area of work — my focus has instead been on online harms affecting adults — I contributed to one of the submissions because parts of the draft policy intersected with my previous work on technosolutionism, function creep, and related issues. This post contains some reflections from that experience.

The submission, its summary and the draft policy are available here: https://zenodo.org/records/20342825

Moral panic is an unstable basis for policy design, particularly in areas involving technology. Our submission attempted to move away from blanket assumptions and toward a closer examination of structural inequalities and uneven social conditions, and an awareness of how policy affects vulnerable populations differently. We included sections on digital use in adverse environments; neurodivergent and disabled students; Aadhaar-linked identity requirements; technosolutionism; and unrealistic or inequitable familial expectations, among other issues.

Digital behaviour is shaped by the environments in families, schools, communities, and society. It is also shaped by (dis)ability, neurodivergence/ neurotypicality, offline safety, psychological distress, and social inclusion or exclusion. Device use does not exist independently of these conditions. Behaviour described as ‘problematic digital use’ or ‘digital addiction’ may, in some cases, reflect coping mechanisms, social compensation, emotional regulation, or attempts to escape stressful environments. In such cases, ‘problematic digital use’ may be better understood as a symptom of harm rather than its cause.

The internet can simultaneously be a refuge and a risk space. Access to the internet may provide information, emotional support, social connection, awareness, or help that are unavailable offline. This becomes particularly relevant for children experiencing unsafe home environments, bullying, exclusion, or inadequate institutional support offline.

Several normative assumptions are implicit in policy design: that all homes are stable and loving, all schools are safe and supportive places, and all parenting or caregiving is equitable across gender, (dis)ability, neurotype, and social location. These assumptions influence how digital behaviour is interpreted. Device use in adverse environments is often interpreted as deviance rather than an adaptation. When ideal or stable conditions are treated as universal, mechanisms developed for coping with adversity are pathologised, sometimes as an ‘addiction.’

The submission also addressed the tendency for technological determinism, particularly the assumption that harm originates primarily from the device or platform itself. Such approaches often collapse all digital engagement into a single category, ignoring differences between educational, assistive, recreational, communicative, and high-risk use. This weakens policy analysis and produces blunt interventions with uneven consequences.

Cyberbullying, exploitative platform design, predatory engagement systems, online abuse, compulsive usage patterns, and other forms of digital harm require serious attention. However, policy responses become less effective when they rely primarily on paternalistic restriction, surveillance-oriented compliance, technologically deterministic assumptions, moral panic approaches, and punitive governance models. Policy framing should move toward harm reduction, contextual assessment, and closer attention to implementation constraints and lived conditions in order to produce more grounded frameworks for understanding digital life.