Social Media Age Checking Requires an Industry Standard Detection Process

Over the last few years, there’s been a big push to increase the age of access to social media apps, due to concerns around exposure to harmful materials, predators, misinformation, etc.

Indeed, in the last year alone, several European nations, including France, Greece and Denmark, have put their support behind a proposal to restrict social media access to users aged under 15, while Spain has proposed a 16 year-old access restriction. Australia and New Zealand are also moving to implement their own laws that would restrict social media access to those over the age of 16, while Norway is also developing its own regulations.

And there’s plenty of research to suggest that social media can be harmful to teens and impressionable users, with even studies conducted by the platforms themselves pointing to increased risks among young users.

The challenge, then, is how you enforce such, and what systems can be put in place that enable age checking (at scale), facilitate equality in access (so that the large platforms don’t unfairly benefit from such obligations), and are actually workable (i.e. that kids can’t circumvent easily).

And that remains the biggest challenge in a viable age-checking system. For all the goodwill and good intent, we still don’t have a reliable, legally enforceable process that we can use as a standard model to enforce such process.

We’re seeing this unfold in the U.K. right now, where its new Online Safety Act was recently enacted.

The new act, among other measures, stipulates that:

“Platforms will be required to prevent children from accessing harmful and age-inappropriate content and provide parents and children with clear and accessible ways to report problems online when they do arise.”

That’s forced all the major platforms to implement their own age-checking measures to keep young users out, and avoid potential fines as a result.

Some of those measures involve newer approaches, like video selfie verification, while others are less sophisticated.

And none, at least right now, are foolproof.

As reported by Engadget:

“Savvy internet users are already circumventing the age checks by using a VPN, providing a fake ChatGPT-generated photo ID, or taking a high-quality selfie of video game characters.”