80% of under-13s bypass social media age restrictions

Additionally, 80 per cent of children aged eight to 12 also used social media in 2024, despite age restrictions on those under 13 years of age.

However, it is worth noting that if you were to disclude YouTube, the 80 per cent figure drops to roughly 44 per cent.

Those under 13 are reportedly bypassing age restrictions in a number of ways, most using an account of a parent or carer (54 per cent), 36 per cent using their own account, and 5 per cent using an account belonging to a sibling or a friend. Twenty-seven per cent used at least one service without an account.

The report also found that these accounts are being made largely with parental permission, with 84 per cent of respondents from eight to 12 revealing that parents and guardians knew about their accounts, while 77 per cent reported having help setting up at least one account, largely from parents.

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Research suggests that parents allow or assist in signing up to social media accounts as they fear their child will be unincluded or struggle socially.

“Considering Australia’s population of 1,596,302 eight- to 12-year-olds, this suggests that about 1.3 million children aged eight to 12 in Australia may be using social media, highlighting potential widespread breaches of age policies,” the report said.

Despite this, social media giants have only shut down a small fraction of accounts known to belong to someone under 13.

Eighty per cent of eight- to 12-year-olds reported no account shutdowns as a result of being underage in 2024, while only 10 per cent reported an account shutdown for being underage. Nine per cent were unsure or did not want to say.

The issue in terminating underage accounts seems to be the difficulty in discovering them.

Users who sign up for social media accounts are prompted to enter their age, which only works if users are truthful. According to the report, research indicates that children will bypass the age restrictions by entering a false birth date, or have a parent set up an account with a false age.

Some services used additional means to determine if a user was under the age of 13. TikTok, Twitch, and Snapchat use language analysis, YouTube uses classifiers, and TikTok also uses AI and facial age estimation. Twitch uses audio, behavioural and traffic analysis tools.

Additionally, when a social media giant identifies a user under the age of 13, the reporting process is difficult and convoluted.

Other than Snapchat and YouTube, services have a specific reporting category for underage users.

Facebook and Instagram’s reporting is difficult, requiring detailed information that the reported may not know. Despite not having an underage reporting category, YouTube’s reporting also required detailed information.

“Discord, TikTok, and Twitch stand out as best practice for providing in-service user reporting options on multiple parts of the service and for providing specific reporting categories and not requiring multiple pieces of information to submit the in-service report,” said the report.

The eSafety Commissioner concluded that the main issue is inconsistent measures taken to ensure age at sign-up.

“These findings indicate there is inconsistency across industry regarding the steps taken to assess the age of end users at various points in the user experience. However, there is one thing they have in common: a lack of robust interventions at the point of account sign-up to a service to prevent someone under 13 from providing a false age or birthdate to set up an account,” said the report.

“The approach of relying solely on accurate self-declaration of age at the point of account sign-up appears to be both flawed and inadequate, as children aged eight to 12 reported they were still creating accounts on the majority of these services (outside of circumstances where such accounts are expressly permitted) – sometimes of their own volition and sometimes with the assistance of a parent or carer, a sibling or a friend.

“Only a minority of children aged eight to 12 (10 per cent) who had their own account reported that their account(s) had been shut down at some point in 2024 due to being underage.”

The report comes as the November deadline for the nation’s new social media ban, which would ban children under the age of 16 from social media platforms.

Despite passing with large government approval, the ban has been heavily critiqued for its lack of detail and questionable practices in identifying the age of young people.

The controversial social media ban raised privacy concerns after Australia said it would trial an age-verification system that may use government identification documents and/or biometrics to ensure a user is over age before registering.

This would require social media platforms like Meta and X to collect this information for the verification process.

According to reports, several Labor MPs raised concerns internally regarding the privacy issues with the bill.

Now, Communications Minister Michelle Rowland has pledged that social media platforms would not be able to request personal documents to verify age.