It’s been months since the UK government began requiring stronger age checks under the Online Safety Act, and recent research suggests those measures are falling short of keeping kids away from harmful content. In some cases, even drawing on a mustache has been reported as enough to fool age detection software.
Like keeping booze away from teenagers or nudie mags out of the hands of young lads, slapping a big “restricted, 18+” label on parts of the internet hasn’t stopped kids testing the limits. Those limits, according to UK online safety group Internet Matters, are easy to sidestep.
The group surveyed over 1,000 UK children and their parents, and while it did report some positive effects from changes made under the OSA, many children saw age verification as an easy-to-bypass hurdle rather than something that kept them genuinely safe.
A full 46 percent of children even said that age checks were easy to bypass, while just 17 percent said that they were difficult to fool. The methods kids use to fool age gates vary, but most are pretty simple: There’s the classic use of a video game character to fool video selfie systems, while in other instances, children reported just entering a fake birthday or using someone else’s ID card when that was required.
The report even cites cases of children drawing a mustache on their faces to fool age detection filters. Seriously.
While nearly half of UK kids say it’s easy to bypass online age checks (and another 17 percent say it’s neither hard nor easy), only 32 percent say they’ve actually bypassed them, according to Internet Matters.
Dude, want some TikTok? My mom will hook us up
Like scoring some booze from “cool” parents, keeping age-gated content out of the hands of kids under the OSA is only as effective as parents let it be, and a quarter of them enable their kids’ online delinquency.
More specifically, Internet Matters found that a full 17 percent of parents admitted to actively helping their kids evade age checks, while an additional 9 percent simply turned a blind eye to it.
“When speaking to parents and children about these situations, they described scenarios in which parents felt they understood the risks involved and, based on their knowledge of their child, were confident the activity was safe,” Internet Matters said of parents who let their kids engage in risky behavior as long as they did it where they could be supervised.
What this means for a major part of the OSA – namely keeping kids from accessing harmful content online – is that it’s falling short. Internet Matters has data to that end, too.
Half of children (49 percent) who responded to the group’s survey said that they’ve encountered harmful content online recently, suggesting that even those who don’t circumvent age gates are still finding it in their feeds.
So, what can be done to make kids’ online safety more effective? Parents told Internet Matters that lawmakers need to do more, and CEO Rachel Huggins agreed that they need help.
“Stronger action is needed from both government and industry to ensure that children can only access online services appropriate for their age and stage and where safety is built in from the outset, rather than added in response to harm,” Huggins said in the report.
The Internet Matters chief pointed to the prime minister’s recent talks with social media firms about tackling online harms, describing the moment as “a timely opportunity for positive change.” ®
