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.”
Of course, there are varying levels of security, and because each platform is essentially going it alone, and coming up with its own approach to align with these rules, there’s no uniformity in enforcement or protection in this respect.
Which is the key flaw, that in order for such a system to be legally enforceable, there needs to be a level of uniformity and cohesion, so that all providers are on an equal playing field. At present, not only are these systems not working, but they’re not workable from a legal standpoint, because a platform could argue that it’s being fined for violations, where others are using less accurate measures, and not being penalized accordingly.
It’s like making seatbelts a legal requirement for car makers, but then providing no standards on what “seatbelt” actually entails. That would see each car maker implementing variable solutions, some of which would be effective, and others that amount to a rope and a hook in the seat.
There needs to be an industry standard for age verification, otherwise all of these measures are just PR, and will have limited effectiveness in application.
The counter-argument would be that even some effectiveness is better than nothing, but if you are going to implement such, by law, surely it’s best to establish clear standards in approach to maximize effectiveness.
The U.K. example shows that we’re still some way off on this front, and that while agreeing to increase the age of access is a key step, coming to an agreed standard on age checking is another essential measure.
