Meta announces new age-verification safeguards, but the kids aren’t having it
Meta says it’s going to start using artificial intelligence to remove people under 13 from its sites and services. But the kids? They’re drawing on mustaches in hopes of bypassing age restrictions.
The changes — and efforts to circumvent them — come as Meta faces a youth-harm trial in New Mexico, where officials are seeking $3.7 billion and changes to age-verification safeguards.
Meta announces new safeguards
On Tuesday, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, announced efforts to strengthen underage enforcement and security for kids online.
“We want young people to have safe, positive experiences online,” Meta said in a statement.
The company said it’s expanding its technology to automatically apply guardrails to accounts it believes might be teens. Meta launched teen accounts last year in the U.S., Australia, Canada and the U.K. Now, it’s expanding the technology to 27 countries in the EU and Brazil.
Plus, it’s introducing a new AI technology that Meta says will detect underage accounts, using visual analysis to look beyond a date of birth.
Meta says the technology will “analyze entire profiles for contextual clues — such as birthday celebrations or mentions of school grades — to determine if an account likely belongs to someone underage.”
Meta says any account suspected of being underage will be deactivated, and account holders will need to provide proof of age through the company’s age verification process. This entails either providing identification or submitting a video through a third-party service.
It’s all an effort to prevent kids from consuming harmful content online, a concern growing in popularity nationwide.
The kids are not having it
Despite age safeguards already in place, a report from the online safety organization Internet Matters found that almost a third of children surveyed in the U.K. admitted to bypassing age checks.
In fact, one mom told The Independent that she caught her child using an eyebrow pencil to draw a mustache in an attempt to circumvent age verification processes.
The report, which came out before Meta announced its new safeguards, noted: “age verification measures are often ineffective in practice or easy to bypass.”
It even found that around 49% of the children surveyed encountered harmful content online recently.
Taking it a step further
The New Mexico lawsuit and Meta’s new safeguards are just two of many efforts globally to protect kids online. Some countries are taking things a step further, beyond requiring age verification, by enacting all-out social media bans.
Both Australia and France have social media bans in place for kids under 16 and 15, respectively. England is also considering joining the ranks.
And while a similar ban is unlikely in the U.S., as Straight Arrow previously reported, additional safeguards are likely to be put in place across social media platforms.
Round out your reading
- First, it was the schools. Now they’re coming for your cellphone at work.
- Why one of America’s top economic forecasters is worried about a recession.
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- We’re building a new Straight Arrow. Help us shape our future by taking our survey.
Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief
