Australian children are easily circumventing inadequate and poorly enforced minimum age rules employed by well-known social media services with most only asking kids to self-declare their age at sign-up, according to a new report released by Australia's online safety regulator.
The report combines the results of a national survey looking at the social media use of Australian children aged 8-15, and information provided directly to eSafety by social media platforms about how they enforce their own age restrictions.
The most popular platforms for kids aged under 13 were identified as YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram, with YouTube the only platform that allows access to users under this age when attached to a family account with parental supervision.
Responses received from YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snap, Reddit, Discord and Twitch, cover the period between January and July 2024, and reveal setting up an account if you were a child under 13 was a relatively simple process with many services only requiring a self-declaration of age at sign up.
The report also reveals mixed results in how a number of platforms were enforcing age limits through proactive tools and reporting systems to detect children under the age of 13 already present on their services.
eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said that the first-of-its-kind report shows very clearly that there is still significant work to be done by any social media platforms relying on truthful self-declaration to determine age with enforcement of the Government's minimum age legislation on the horizon.
"Social media services not only need to make it harder for underage users to sign up to their services in the first place, but also make sure that users who are old enough to be on the service, but are not yet adults, have strong safety measures in place by default," Ms Inman Grant said.
"Few have any real stringent measures in place to determine age accurately at the point of sign-up so there's nothing stopping a 14-year-old for instance entering a false age or date of birth and setting up an unrestricted adult account that doesn't carry those extra safety features.
"And this likely means the platforms are unaware of the true numbers of users identified as children and teens on their services. Some platforms also make it very difficult to report under-aged users who are on their platforms today.
"As a result, the reported numbers of monthly active users by services under the age of 18 likely underestimate the true numbers. This is likely also true in the very young cohort aged 13-15 which will be deemed too young to access some services when the Government's minimum age legislation comes into force by the end of the year.
"Even with the likely underestimation of the true numbers, we are still talking about a lot of kids. For instance, Snapchat says of its 8.3 million monthly active users in Australia almost 440,000 are aged 13-15, Instagram with around 19 million users says around 350,000 are in this age group, YouTube with well over 25 million users said 325,000 were aged 13-15, while TikTok with close to 10 million users reported around 200,000 were in this early teen cohort.
"Our survey also found 95 per cent of teens aged 13-15 reported using at least one of the 8 social media services since January 2024, so we can expect the actual numbers to be much higher.
"We'll be consulting with industry and other stakeholders this year about what reasonable steps platforms should be expected to take to give effect to the minimum age requirements, and this report will be one key input to that process. This report shows that there will be a tremendous amount of work to be done between now and December."
Ms Inman Grant said age restrictions, while important, are just one part of a wider holistic approach eSafety is taking to ensure children and teens are having safe age-appropriate experiences online.
"We remain committed to working with teachers, parents and young people, to not only ensure they are well informed about risks, but also well-equipped to thrive online by building digital literacy and resilience, and providing access to meaningful, co-designed educational content and resources," she said.
"And these resources are freely available on our website esafety.gov.au right now."
Key findings:
- Services all used different methodologies to calculate their monthly active end user figures, so they can't be directly compared, but both the data obtained from providers and the data obtained from children show that YouTube, Snapchat, TikTok and Instagram are popular among Australians 13-17.
- Reddit did not know how many users it had between the ages of 13-17.
- 80% of Australian children aged 8-12 used one or more social media services in 2024.
- This suggests that around 1.3 million children aged 8-12 in Australia may have been using social media, highlighting potential widespread breaches of minimum age policies.
- The most popular services with children aged 8-12 were YouTube (68% of children surveyed), TikTok (31%) and Snapchat (19%).
- 54% of children aged 8-12 who had used social media accessed these services via their parent's or carer's account(s)
- 36% of children aged 8-12 who had used social media had their own account with 77% of those saying they had help to set up their account(s). This help came mostly from parents or carers.
- Of the platforms eSafety requested information from, most relied solely on someone's truthful self-declaration of their date of birth at the point of account sign-up. No additional age assurance tools were used upfront at this sign-up stage.
- This means that if a child provided a false date of birth at sign-up which indicated they were over 13, they were able to create an account and access the service.
- Most services developed and/or implemented some form of technology or tools to assess the age of users once they were on the service.
- Some services - TikTok, Twitch, Snapchat and YouTube - used tools to proactively detect users under 13. While other services had some tools and technology available, they were not using it to detect underage users.
- The vast majority of services undertook some research to expand or improve their existing age assurance tools or look at new and additional tools.
- Some services had relatively straightforward and easy pathways for people to report another user as being under 13, while the pathways of other services contained more friction and barriers.
