SOCIAL MEDIA ADDICTION AND CYBER RISKS AMONG YOUTH IN INDIA: CHALLENGES AND PREVENTIVE MEASURES

Abstract

India's youth population now constitutes one of the largest concentrations of social media users anywhere in the world, with active internet users crossing 886 million in 2024 and a substantial share of that growth concentrated among adolescents and young adults. This expansion has delivered genuine benefits in education, civic participation, and social connection, but it has also been accompanied by a parallel rise in problematic patterns of use and exposure to digitally mediated harm. Drawing on peer-reviewed Indian clinical and public-health research, government data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) and the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C), international comparative evidence from the World Health Organization's Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC) survey, and civil-society documentation from UNICEF and Child Rights and You (CRY), this paper examines the scale and character of social media addiction among Indian youth and maps the principal cyber risks that accompany it: cyberbullying, online harassment, identity theft, phishing and financial fraud, privacy breaches, sextortion and image-based abuse, and misinformation and deepfakes. The analysis indicates that Indian studies report social media or internet addiction-related behaviour in roughly one-fifth to two-fifths of college-going samples depending on instrument and setting, a range broadly consistent with international meta-analytic estimates, while financial cybercrime complaints routed through the I4C's 1930 helpline have grown from under a hundred lakh in 2023 to more than three crore in 2025. The paper situates these findings within established psychological frameworks, including the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) construct grounded in self-determination theory and the Interaction of Person-Affect-Cognition-Execution (I-PACE) model of problematic technology use, to explain why adolescents and young adults are disproportionately vulnerable to both compulsive engagement and exploitation. It then proposes the Youth Cyber Safety and Digital Well-Being Framework (YCSDWF), a seven-pillar preventive architecture spanning digital literacy, responsible usage norms, cyber hygiene, privacy protection, mental health support, institutional and policy interventions, and community awareness, designed for phased implementation by schools, families, platforms, and government bodies. The paper closes with policy recommendations directed at the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), the Ministry of Education, state governments, and digital platforms, and identifies the principal limitations of the secondary-data approach used here, including the continuing scarcity of large-scale, nationally representative Indian data on adolescent digital well-being.