As more regions consider teen social media bans, Meta published a new overview of its concerns about these restrictions, noting specifically that the bans won’t work unless the enforcement mechanism is universal and effective.
In a new post, Antigone Davis, Meta’s head of global safety, outlined what she said are the key challenges of keeping teens off of social media apps, and which tools are available to help with that.
As per Davis: “For any of these proposals to succeed, apps must know the age of their users. But proving age on the internet remains a complex, industrywide challenge.”
Davis said that many teens don’t have traditional government IDs, and that requiring people to upload sensitive personal documents to every individual app they use creates significant privacy risks.
“Furthermore, smaller or emerging platforms often lack the robust security infrastructure required to safeguard this data, which can inadvertently expose millions of people to security breaches,” Davis said.
Meta has highlighted this as a key issue several times. The company has repeatedly said that under the current system, each individual app is required to verify the age of each user. However, if age-checking was done at the app store level, that would create a more universal age checking process and put the onus on Apple and Google to confirm user ages before downloading an app. Meta argues that this would be more effective.
Davis makes that case again in her overview, though the broader point Davis is looking to highlight is that the current age-checking proposals will lead to inconsistent results, and therefore lack true impact.
“Australia’s under-16 social media ban highlights just how complex this logistical piece remains,” Davis said. “Because the policy was introduced without an established, privacy-preserving method for age verification, it has led to the unintended consequences safety experts feared: reports of teens bypassing inconsistent age checks, circumventing restrictions, and migrating to unmonitored apps and gaming sites that fall outside the scope of the ban.”These privacy concerns are why authorities in Ireland are exploring an alternative approach, with the implementation of an expanded Digital ID system, which would provide teenagers with a means to verify their ages.
For the most part, however, the bigger concern with the Australian model is that the measures introduced have been utterly ineffective.
In an April report from Australia’s eSafety Commissioner examining the first three months of the country’s under-16 social media ban, the response data indicated that around 70% of underage teens were still accessing and using social apps.
The current measures have offered little friction, and young users are technically savvy enough to side-step most of the enacted age-checking measures.
As Davis wrote, the solution can’t just be writing laws that restrict teens. An effective approach needs to also factor in the practicality of social media bans, as well as how apps will be enabled to lock teens out using those measures.
The answer, then, lies in an agreed method or approach that all platforms need to abide by, thus ensuring that legal enforcement is valid, and isn’t reliant on each platform just doing the best that it can to restrict teen access.
Or, as Meta has repeatedly stated, implementing app store-level restrictions.
Which Davis further reiterated: “There is a practical framework that directly answers the complex logistical challenges I’ve laid out: centralizing age verification and parental approval at the app store level. App stores are already the gateway through which teens access every app on their phones. And we don’t have to start from scratch. Apple and Google already collect age information when a parent sets up their teen’s phone, and they already have systems in place to obtain parental approval before teens can make purchases. We’re simply asking that this same mechanism be extended to all app downloads.”
Meta’s proposal makes sense, but Apple and Google continue to push back on the concept because that would place all legal liabilities for any violations onto their businesses.
But it would, as Davis said, address the main challenge of universal enforcement.
“By verifying a person’s age just once at this device level, the phone itself acts as a single, secure checkpoint,” Davis said. “This allows parents to seamlessly approve or deny downloads across all platforms simultaneously, removing the need for people to upload sensitive personal documentation to dozens of individual apps.”
Yet, even as the approach is being debated, more regions are looking to implement teen social media bans.
Proposals are in varying levels of implementation in many nations, with Spain, France, Denmark, Portugal, the U.K., New Zealand, Thailand, Indonesia and Austria all exploring enhanced restrictions, similar to the Australian law, with many other regions also examining their options.
This week, Canada moved to the next stage in its own teen social media regulations, according to Reuters. Like Australia, this ban would make it illegal for those under the age of 16 to access social media apps.
Though also like Australia, the expectation in Canada is that this will not be effective, because it’s less about legal documentation, and more about the practical application of such measures.
In this respect, Davis makes a valid point, reiterating Meta’s push to hold app stores accountable for age verification.
Whether governments will be keen to take on Apple and Google, and their army of lobbyists, remains to be seen.
