The flaws of teen social media bans

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We’re coming up on half a year since Australia led the charge and banned children under 16 from major social media platforms. Since then, many other countries have followed suit, including the UK, Malaysia, Indonesia, Denmark, Greece and the United Arab Emirates. Other countries including Canada, Austria, France and Spain are working on digital safety bills that include a restriction on social media for kids under 15 or 16.

And while this may be the hottest thing going since doomscrolling videos of Scottish World Cup fans living it up in America, let’s have some real talk about these bans.

Here’s the problem: They don’t work.

An early study from the University of Newcastle concluded that Australia’s ban of children under 16 from TikTok, X, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube and Snapchat has been minimally effective. The study showed that more than 80 percent of kids under 16 in Australia said they were still accessing social media.

And this highlights the problem: these bans look really good on paper. They make the adults in the room feel really good about themselves.

But implementing these bans effectively is pretty tough from the technology side of things, and (news flash!) kids are pretty tech-savvy. In addition, creating a process for age verification has also created significant security risks I think a lot of people don’t even understand.

Sigh. So, let’s dig in.

How are kids circumventing the bans?

As stated above, kids are generally far more tech-savvy than the adults they live with. And they are definitely more tech-savvy than the legislators creating these laws. (Remember when Sen. Ted Stevens said the internet is a series of tubes? That’s the level of understanding we’re sometimes talking about here. Every time Mark Zuckerberg testifies to Congress, the questions asked by our legislators make my head want to explode.) So, no surprise, smart teens are finding ways to circumvent the system.

• According to that study in Australia, two-thirds of teens said they had to go through an age verification check, but not everyone was asked to provide photo ID. Many were simply asked to provide their age (easy to lie) or upload a selfie (easy to fabricate).

• Kids are using fake accounts with older ages.

• Kids are using VPNs to access these platforms through other countries without restrictions.

• Kids are operating as normal and the system is failing to catch them and ask for age verification at all.

What is the responsibility of the platforms?

Creating laws that ban kids from using social media is a simple idea, but – to be fair to the Metas of the world – actually doing it is a lot harder. Remember that Meta has 3.58 BILLION users across its platforms. Some ask for your birthday or age when you create an account. Some don’t. Some make it optional. And the entire thing is run on the honor system – no one actually checks the info you provide. I could say I’m an 80-year-old man from Brazil and Facebook would be like, “Obrigado, Julio!”

So, asking these platforms to now separate out the accounts owned by teens in specific countries and then verify that they are actually the right age is honestly a bit of a nightmare technologically. Users are not required to put a country of residence on their Facebook profile at all, and many people do not. If I update my Facebook profile to say I live in Paris, no one at Meta verifies this is true. Let’s be real: Meta sometimes has trouble determining if someone is just a human, so I think this may just be a bridge too far.

It is not surprising to me that the platforms have been unable to apply this across the board in a more effective manner. To do so, they would need to reengineer the way new accounts are set up, and that still wouldn’t help with those 3.5 billion users already on the platforms. If I know anything about the major social media platforms, they don’t like making big changes to the “bones” of their infrastructure because it creates a ripple effect of other things being broken and then needing to be fixed.

I don’t honestly think it’s feasible without truly overhauling just about everything about how the platforms work. And even then, those wily kids may find a way around the whole thing anyway.

The unacknowledged security risk

To me, these bans (again) look great on paper, but no one is talking about the big security risk created by them. To verify someone’s age, platforms are collecting images of photo IDs. They are collecting selfies of the kids. That makes me awfully nervous, and I don’t even have kids.

It’s not news that the platforms have on occasion had security breaches. And there is no public information about how all of this documentation is being stored. Channeling my inner Gandalf: Is it secret? Is it safe?? No one has addressed retention (how long these records need to be stored), and none of these new laws has mandated security for this information.

So, let’s say you’re a 16-year-old Australian kid verifying your age with Meta. You might have a driver’s license. Or you might not. So, you might provide a scan of your license or passport. Or you might upload a selfie. Think about all the information contained on your passport. Do you want Meta having that information about your kid? Especially in today’s age of data breaches and hacks? This is already a risk for adults managing Facebook accounts on behalf of companies. We are required to verify our identity to do a number of things with company accounts. I can’t tell you how many times I have had to submit my own passport to Meta. That has always made me nervous. Let’s not make it worse.

In addition, to send that picture or document scan to Meta, the kid has to take a picture, scan a document, etc., and that photo or scan then lives on their laptop, phone, sits in iCloud forever, etc. So now that document is more at risk should the kid’s Apple or Microsoft account be hacked.

Then I wonder about how Meta is connecting my passport scan with my specific profile? If there is not a strong system that can link proof of identity to an individual user, the net result is that the system will repeatedly ask that user to submit verification… meaning that your teen may not only be providing Meta with a copy of his/her passport but they may be asked to do it multiple times. Anyone who has ever played the 2-factor text me a code game will understand. Where does all that information go and how is it protected? We don’t know. And that makes me damn nervous.

There’s already a precedent. Last October, the popular platform Discord suffered a data breach during which hackers obtained photo IDs that were submitted by users to *gasp* verify their age. So, Discord collected that data from users and then did not secure or protect it properly. (Read my blog on the incident here). Given that kids have generally clean credit records, this data would be a treasure trove for criminals. I don’t know that the good of these social media bans outweighs the risk, and I honestly think it probably doesn’t.

The response

In Australia, legislators have already raised the fines for platforms violating the new laws, moving to double the fees for noncompliance to $99 million AUD (roughly $68.4 million USD). That sounds hefty but remember that Meta’s quarterly profit in just the first quarter of this year was $26.77 billion (with a B). While that’s a substantial fine, it’s also not a bank-breaker. I understand the notion of encouraging compliance by raising the fines, but the real truth is that it is probably still cheaper for Meta to just pay the fine than to put the man hours into entirely reengineering the bones of its system. For this to be an effective tactic, the fines would have to be much bigger. And even then, the cost-benefit analysis might conclude it’s just easier to pay the fine.

So where does that leave us?

It’s my opinion that these bans are just not going to be effective, no matter how much the adults in the room want a quick and easy way to deal with this issue. I don’t believe it’s the type of thing that can be legislated into existence. Because kids will find a way to get online. Kids will find a way to circumvent the restrictions placed on them. It’s just what kids do. The platforms do not want to do this – it will be expensive and time-consuming to implement, and it will be even more expensive and time-consuming to implement WELL. Expect them to drag their feet and do the bare minimum.

I also am not sure that blanket banning kids from social media is the smartest thing. For instance, most of these bans include Youtube. I want kids to be able to access Youtube. You can learn a lot of things on Youtube. And the internet is largely leaning video, Google results now prioritize video from Google-owned Youtube, so blocking kids from accessing all videos on the platform seems like a bit of an overreach. What if your kid wants to watch videos about how to fix a car? They can’t under these bans.

Also, simply not allowing kids onto these platforms until they are older doesn’t teach them anything about using them properly. It just delays the learning. And banning them makes them a shiny object. If your parents say you can’t have it, of course that makes you want it more. It’s just human nature.

In the end, I believe this battle has to be fought on the front lines. If we want kids to put down their phones, we need to teach them why they should put them down. If we want kids to do things outside, we need to encourage them to do that. We need to go do those things with them. Parents hold most of the responsibility here: teach your kids about why staying on screen all the time is bad, implement quiet times at home, limit screen time to a certain amount of time a day, be aware of what your kids are looking at, monitor their accounts, take family outings, create “no screen” family time. And – most of all – model the behavior you want to see. I can’t tell you how many parents complain about their kids being on their phones all the time without realizing that they are also on their phones all the time. If you do it, your kids will do it.

I don’t believe this is an issue that can be regulated into compliance. This is change behavior. This is education. And this is teaching on a kid-by-kid basis.

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Here’s a random idea to close: I have a group of friends who have a regular dinner meetup. At the start of the meal, everyone turns their phone volume UP and then all the phones are placed in the center of the table, face down in a big, tall pile like Jenga. The rule is: if everyone gets through the meal without touching any of the phones, they split the check and everyone pays their share. If someone just HAS to touch their phone during the meal, that person pays for the whole table. I think it’s a brilliant way to have some fun and emphasize that the point of the dinner is to reconnect in person and spend time with your friends. You could certainly try this with your own friends or make a version of it for family time.

There are creative ways to encourage kids (and adults) to reduce their screen time and use social media appropriately. We just have to have the courage to do it.