PTA Tells IHC: No Power to Ban Social Media for Under-16s

Key takeaways

Pakistan’s telecom regulator told the Islamabad High Court it has no legal authority to impose age verification or restrict social media access for children under 16. The PTA said such powers must come from new legislation, not its own action — even as pressure builds for an under-16 ban.

Illustration of a smartphone with app icons beside a shield with a padlock, representing age-restriction and online child protection — Illustration: WHAT TODAY?

ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority has told the Islamabad High Court that it lacks the statutory power to impose mandatory age verification or block children under 16 from using social media platforms.

In a detailed report submitted to the court on Thursday, the regulator said the relief sought in a pending writ petition — a universal minimum age for social media accounts — goes beyond its existing legal mandate, and asked the court to dismiss the petition to the extent that it demands measures outside the authority’s powers.

The petition, filed in August by citizen Waqas Nasir through his lawyers, asks the court to direct the federal government to introduce legislation and a comprehensive regulatory framework for children’s social media use. It argues that minors are increasingly exposed to cyberbullying, online harassment and inappropriate content, and that the state must put proper protections in place. On August 31, Chief Justice Sarfraz Dogar issued notices on the constitutional petition to a slate of ministries — including IT, Interior, Law, Information and Broadcasting, Federal Education and Human Rights — as well as the PTA, PEMRA, the National Commission on the Rights of the Child and the National Commission for Human Rights, the Express Tribune reported.

The legal argument: regulator can’t create powers it doesn’t have

The PTA’s core argument is a constitutional one about the limits of administrative action. As a statutory regulator, the authority said, it can exercise only the powers Parliament has expressly given it — and no law currently prescribes a minimum age for social media use or authorises a universal age-verification system.

The report pointed to Section 37 of the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act (PECA) 2016, which empowers the PTA to block or remove unlawful online content on specified legal grounds. That, the authority argued, is a content-removal power — not a licence to set a minimum age for an entire country’s social media users or to invent a new verification regime by administrative order.

“Any allegation of failure must be assessed against specific statutory duties,” the authority told the court, noting that prescribing a minimum age of 16 was not among them. In other words: the regulator says it cannot be faulted for not doing something Parliament never empowered it to do.

The technical argument: why blocking children is hard

Beyond the legal question, the PTA’s report offered a detailed technical analysis of why regulating platforms is, in its words, fraught with difficulty.

First, the major platforms — Facebook, Google and X — operate in Pakistan as “over the top” services. They are neither licensed by the PTA nor registered in Pakistan, which means they are not bound by local codes of conduct. A regulator can approach the operators directly, but such requests are typically evaluated under the platforms’ own community guidelines, which may not line up with Pakistani law.

Second, most platforms run on HTTPS encryption. That security protocol prevents a third party from seeing which specific resource or piece of content is being accessed inside an encrypted connection — so blocking one URL on an encrypted platform is nearly impossible without blocking the whole site, which would also cut off legitimate content.

Third, the report noted that artificial intelligence is adding new layers of complexity to an already fast-moving content environment.

Despite these limits, the authority defended its record. Its URL Blocking Summary showed more than 1.78 million reported URLs processed, of which over 1.57 million were blocked — an action rate of about 88.2 per cent. The breakdown: 88.68 per cent of reported TikTok links, 87.34 per cent on YouTube and 78.57 per cent on Facebook; action was taken against 79.52 per cent of reported Instagram links and 48.42 per cent on X. More than a million blocked links related to obscene material, over 200,000 to content against Islam, and more than 46,000 to national-security concerns. The report also listed awareness campaigns run with UNICEF, TikTok, Meta and the mobile industry body GSMA on digital literacy and child online protection.

The legal landscape is shifting: SMPRA is coming

A significant part of the PTA’s submission concerns the transition already under way. With the promulgation of the Prevention of Electronic Crimes (Amendment) Act 2025, a new body — the Social Media Protection and Regulatory Authority, or SMPRA — is set to take over social media regulation from the PTA.

Until SMPRA is formally notified, the PTA said, it is continuing to perform its functions under the original 2016 framework on a best-efforts basis — but its mandate on content removal and blocking has become transitional in nature.

That raises the prospect that the under-16 question could land on a different regulator’s desk before the court case concludes, depending on when SMPRA is stood up and what powers its rules grant it.

Why it matters

The scale of what is at stake is enormous. The petition cites DataReportal figures estimating nearly 117 million internet users and roughly 79.9 million social media user identities in Pakistan — a youth-heavy population exposed to platforms the regulator says it cannot age-gate.

The PTA’s position arrives at a moment of growing political momentum for age restrictions. Last month, Punjab Assembly member Sarah Ahmad moved a resolution calling for a nationwide ban on social media accounts for children under 16 without parental consent, urging the provincial government to push the federal government for comprehensive legislation and stronger online safety measures.

And Pakistan is not debating in a vacuum. Australia became the first country to ban under-16s from major social media platforms in December 2025, with penalties of up to A$49.5 million for non-compliant platforms. Since then, the trend has spread: Indonesia introduced under-16 restrictions in March, Malaysia began barring under-16 registrations in June, Greece banned social media access for under-15s in April, India’s Karnataka state imposed an under-16 ban in March, Canada tabled a digital safety bill in June, and the European Commission has proposed an under-13 ban.

What’s next

For now, the ball is in the Islamabad High Court’s court. If it accepts the PTA’s argument, the case would either need new legislation — which Parliament has not yet passed — or shift toward the incoming SMPRA once it is notified.

The more immediate question is whether the government moves before the courts do. The Punjab Assembly resolution and the Waqas Nasir petition show pressure from both legislative and judicial directions, and the federal government has yet to signal whether it will table the kind of law the PTA says is needed. Until it does, Pakistani children can open accounts on every major platform — and the country’s regulator says its hands are tied.