Late last year, Australia implemented a social media ban for those aged under 16, and reports since suggest that things aren’t exactly going as planned. For one, companies reportedly don’t seem to be actually checking some accounts.
Reuters spoke to a team of software testers, who report that several companies failed to ask for proof of age on any of the 50 accounts they opened after the ban rolled out.
The team behind the accounts set their age as 16, but nine of the ten services the testers attempted to use reportedly failed to check their age in any way. This includes Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube. Kick, the streaming platform, reportedly did ask for proof of age in order to let users make accounts.
In an extreme case, one profile claiming to be 16 on X was reportedly served pornographic content. Reuters reports it was told by a Meta spokesperson that the test accounts weren’t checked as it wasn’t clear if they had “posted content or engaged in a way a true under-16-year-old user would”. In other words, it may not have been clear through account history and usage whether they were the claimed age.
Andrew Hammond, a director at the testing firm who ran the original trial, says, “You should be asked to demonstrate how old you are, and not once have we been asked to verify our age or use age-assurance measures.”
A spokesperson for the eSafety commissioner told Reuters that the regulator “remains confident that age-restricted platforms have the technology and resources they need to prevent Australian children under 16 from having accounts.”
It seems like the ball is in the court of platform holders as to whether or not teenagers will be sufficiently vetted. And this is all before mentioning ways in which potential users can circumvent those age checks. Last year, we spotted that you could get around age verification checks on Discord with a phone and a copy of Death Stranding. A few months ago, we noted you could even use a 3D model in a browser to get around it.
It seems like there’s not only an ideological battlefield in the implementation of age checks, but a technical one too, and it will need a lot of support to actually work.
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