INTRODUCTION
Social experiments and prank videos are some of the most-watched content on the internet. They are also some of the least scrutinised. Their appeal is intuitive. Real people, unscripted reactions, the thrill of watching someone caught entirely off guard. For creators, the formula is reliable: manufacture confusion or discomfort, point a camera at a stranger, upload the results. For platforms, the engagement metrics are difficult to argue with. What gets lost in this equation is usually the person in the middle of the frame, the one who did not sign up to be entertainment.
The legal and ethical problems with this genre of content are not hypothetical. They have specific constitutional and statutory anchors in Indian law, and they are worth taking seriously.
The rise of the creator economy has only intensified this trend. Platforms such as YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and Snapchat Spotlight reward content that captures attention within seconds, often prioritising shock value, emotional reactions, and virality over ethical considerations. In an increasingly competitive digital landscape, creators are incentivised to push boundaries in pursuit of views and monetisation, giving rise to a culture of ‘content first, consent later.’ As pranks become more elaborate and intrusive to stand out in algorithm-driven feeds, the legal consequences of treating unsuspecting individuals as content have become impossible to ignore.
Privacy Does Not End at the Door: The most common defence offered by prank creators is also the laziest: it happened in public, so anything goes. This argument did not survive contact with the Supreme Court’s 2017 judgment in Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India[1], which held that privacy is a fundamental right under Article 21[2] of the Constitution, not a conditional privilege that evaporates the moment you step outside your home.
The Court was clear that privacy is inseparable from dignity and personal autonomy. The relevant distinction is not between public and private spaces. It is between being observed by people around you and being permanently recorded, uploaded, and exposed to an audience of millions. When a prank video goes viral, the individual at its centre has not consented to any of that. They have simply, and briefly, existed in the world.
From Virality to Criminal Liability: Recent incidents demonstrate that the legal concerns surrounding prank content are no longer hypothetical. In 2017, Delhi Police arrested a YouTuber for uploading videos of non-consensually kissing women under the guise of a prank. More recently, creators in Uttar Pradesh have faced police action for filming pranks involving the harassment of an elderly man with shaving foam, staging a fake kidnapping of a minor, and orchestrating a fabricated kidnapping to generate sensational online content.[3] These incidents illustrate that when online entertainment infringes upon the rights, safety, or dignity of others, it may cease to be mere content and instead attract criminal liability.
The Legal Scaffolding: Section 66E of the Information Technology Act, 2000[4] criminalises the capture and dissemination of images that violate a person’s privacy without consent. Its primary target is intimate imagery, but the principle it encodes applies more broadly: technological capability does not create legal permission. Just because you can film someone and publish that footage does not mean you are entitled to do so.
The BNS 2023[5] has updated India’s criminal framework to address digital offences, including voyeurism and cyber-defamation. The IT (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules 2021[6] impose due diligence obligations on major platforms; they are expected to act against unlawful content and maintain functioning grievance mechanisms. Taken together, these provisions describe an environment where the law is at least trying to keep pace with the digital content ecosystem. Whether enforcement matches that ambition is a separate question.
The Dignity Problem: Underneath the legal analysis is something simpler: what prank videos often do, structurally, is manufacture another person’s humiliation for an audience’s entertainment. The subject does not have a say in how they are framed, how they are described in the caption, or who eventually sees them. They might discover weeks later that footage of them looking frightened or confused has been shared hundreds of thousands of times, often with a comment section attached.
The Supreme Court has consistently held that Article 21’s guarantee of life includes the right to live with dignity.[7] Digital humiliation complicates this in a way that physical embarrassment does not: it does not end. Content can be copied, reposted, and archived indefinitely. Deleting the original upload rarely erases the record. The creator has moved on to the next video. The person in it has not.
Consent, whether written, verbal, or clearly implied, is the obvious solution. It is also frequently absent, because the entire premise of a prank depends on the subject not knowing what is happening. This is not a minor procedural oversight. It is the point at which the genre’s core logic conflicts with the rights of the people it depends on.
WHAT CHILDREN ARE WATCHING, AND WHAT THEY ARE LEARNING?
Prank content is not a niche genre consumed primarily by adults with a clear understanding of what they are watching. It is among the most-viewed categories on platforms that children use daily. This matters for reasons that go beyond protecting minors from inappropriate content.
Repeated exposure to videos that frame deception, public humiliation, and staged distress as entertainment can shape what seems normal. At a stage of development where the cognitive capacity to critically evaluate media is still forming, children do not always have the tools to distinguish between a performative prank and actual conduct they might replicate.[8] The argument is not that watching a prank video causes delinquency. It is that normalisation is gradual and cumulative, and the content environment children inhabit is not neutral.
The responsibility for a safer digital environment does not belong to any single party. Platforms that algorithmically reward shock value, creators who treat other people’s distress as raw material, and a regulatory framework that has not yet caught up with the speed of the industry all of these are part of the same problem. Fixing it requires acknowledging that entertainment and accountability are not mutually exclusive.[9]
CONCLUSION
Every argument made above points to the same underlying failure: Indian law has the doctrinal tools to deal with non-consensual filming, but not the institutional will to apply them to an industry built almost entirely on non-consent. Section 66E exists. Puttaswamy exists. The IT Rules’ due diligence obligations exist. What does not exist is a single reported case where a prank channel has been held liable for the privacy violation inherent in its format, rather than for some incidental act caught on camera.
This is not a gap in legislation. It is a gap in enforcement, and the two should not be confused. Treating it as a legislative gap invites more statutes that will be equally unenforced. Treating it as an enforcement gap forces a harder question: why are platforms, which have both the technical capacity and the contractual leverage to demand proof of consent before monetising a video, not required to do so as a precondition of hosting it?
The honest answer is that virality is profitable and consent is friction, and no one in the supply chain (creator, platform, or advertiser) has an incentive to introduce friction voluntarily. Until that incentive structure changes, either through platform liability that bites or through a regulator willing to make an example of someone, the law’s existing protections will remain exactly what they are now: correct in principle, and largely irrelevant in practice.
Author(s) Name: Avni Ojha (The National Law Institute University, Bhopal)
References:
[1] Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v Union of India (2017) 10 SCC 1 (SC).
[2] Constitution of India 1950, art 21.
[3] YouTubers Detained for Kidnapping Boy’ The Times of India (16 February 2025) <https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kanpur/8-youtubers-detained-for-kidnapping-boy/articleshow/128394545.cms> accessed 20 July 2026
[4] Information Technology Act 2000, s 66E.
[5] Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita 2023.
[6] Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules 2021.
[7] Constitution of India 1950, art 21; Francis Coralie Mullin v Administrator, Union Territory of Delhi (1981) 1 SCC 608.
[8] United Nations Children’s Fund, Children in a Digital World (State of the World’s Children Report 2017).
[9] Sheela Barse v Union of India (1986) 3 SCC 596.