By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: A Pakistani man has asked the Islamabad High Court to order the federal government to write a law barring children and teenagers under 16 from opening or running their own social media accounts, his lawyer said Sunday, arguing that the country has no real way to stop kids from signing up and no way to protect them once they do.
The petition, filed on behalf of Waqas Nasir by advocates Muhammad Jalal Haider, Yahya Farid Khwaja and Muhammad Zeshan Ali, lands as Pakistan’s youth population pours online largely unchecked. The country has roughly 117 million internet users, and nearly 80 million active social media accounts, according to DataReportal, a firm that tracks global digital trends — a figure equal to about 31 percent of the population. More than 11 percent of Pakistanis are between the ages of 13 and 17, and the median age nationally is just under 21.
Haider, in an interview, pointed to a single platform to make his case.
“In Pakistan, if you look at TikTok, for instance, out of say one million users in Pakistan, half of them are children under 16,” he said. “So regulating this is extremely important because a situation has emerged where children have become addicted to it.”
The petition holds up Australia as the model to follow. Canberra’s Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act, passed in 2024, set a hard floor of 16 for social media use nationwide — the toughest such restriction adopted by any major democracy to date. Haider said his clients are asking Pakistani courts to borrow that framework wholesale.
“Basically, we have referenced Australia’s law as a precedent, where they introduced rules regarding a minimum age for social media in 2024,” Haider said. “Under those rules, the use of social media has been banned for children under 16 years of age.”
But the petition’s core request isn’t really about banning teenagers outright — it’s about verifying who they are in the first place. Haider said the filing leans on the legal doctrine of parens patriae, which holds that the state has both the authority and the duty to step in and protect minors when their own guardians cannot or do not. Rather than placing the burden solely on parents to police their children’s phones, the petition asks the court to order two of the government’s own agencies to build the safeguard themselves.
“We have emphasized parental control, but we have placed greater emphasis on an age verification mechanism,” Haider said. “PTA and NADRA should jointly build a similar mechanism to detect if a user is under 16, so that their account cannot be created or operated at all.”
PTA is the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority; NADRA is the National Database and Registration Authority, which maintains the country’s national identity records. The petition envisions the two working in tandem — one controlling access to networks, the other confirming who is actually behind the screen.
Haider said the proposal would cut both ways, holding families and technology companies to account in equal measure. “We have mentioned imposing penalties on parents if they allow children under 16 to use social media,” he said. “Secondly, social media apps should also be obligated to align their platforms with Pakistani laws.”
The scale of the enforcement problem the petition describes is already visible in the numbers platforms themselves report. TikTok says it removes tens of millions of videos in Pakistan every quarter for violating its community guidelines, and globally takes down more than 20 million accounts each quarter suspected of belonging to users under 13, the platform’s minimum registration age.
The public health case for tighter limits has been building for years, and the petition draws on it directly. A U.S. surgeon general’s advisory found that teenagers who spend more than three hours a day on social media face roughly double the risk of showing symptoms of depression and anxiety. The American Psychological Association has separately urged limits on minors’ exposure to content involving self-harm, cyberbullying and sexual material, citing their heightened vulnerability to it.
Haider said the petitioners deliberately named the federal government itself as a respondent, rather than any single ministry, to ensure that whatever the court orders cannot be confined to one province or dodged by one department.
“We have made the Federal Government, the Federation of Pakistan, a party to this so that a federal law is enacted,” he said. “Once that law is passed, it will naturally be enforceable across Pakistan.”
Beyond age verification, the petitioners are asking the court to compel the government to draft a broader policy addressing children’s digital rights, privacy and mental and physical safety online, and to stand up a dedicated regulatory body tasked specifically with children’s online protection. The filing cites Australia alongside France, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Spain as countries that have each adopted some version of age restrictions, parental consent requirements or verification systems for young social media users. It also invokes the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and the UN’s General Comment No. 25, arguing that safeguarding children’s welfare online is not a discretionary policy goal but a binding legal obligation.
Named as respondents in the case are the Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunication, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, the Ministry of Interior, the Ministry of Law and Justice, PTA, and the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority, or PEMRA.
The court filing follows a resolution introduced in the Punjab Assembly last month by provincial lawmaker Sarah Ahmad, who is pushing for a similar nationwide restriction through the legislature rather than the courts. Her resolution calls on the provincial government to formally recommend that Islamabad pass legislation barring children under 16 from creating or keeping social media accounts unless a parent or legal guardian consents through a verified process. It also asks PTA to build and enforce age-verification systems across every platform operating in the country, and would require social media companies to promptly remove harmful content as a condition of doing business in Pakistan.
The resolution frames the issue in constitutional terms, describing the protection of children’s physical, mental, psychological and moral development as both a legal and moral obligation of the state — language that echoes closely through the Islamabad petition itself, filed just weeks later.
No hearing date had been set as of Sunday.
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