Australian children massively bypass age limit set by social media

Around 84% of all kids between the age of 8 and 12 in Australia had used at least one social media or messaging service since the beginning of 2024. And their parents knew about this.

According to the latest edition of the eSafety Commissioner’s ‘Children and Social Media Survey’, which was conducted in September 2024, 80% of all 8 to 12 years olds currently have a social media or messaging account, despite being under the age limit of 13 years.

This means that roughly 1.3 million underaged children in Australia are using social media when they’re not supposed to.

Among children who had their own social media account, 77% said they got help from their parents or guardians setting up their account.

80% of children between the ages of 8 to 12 who had one or more social media accounts last year, reported that none of their accounts was shutdown due to the fact they were underaged. Only 10% of the kids admit their account was closed for being younger than 13. 9% of the children said they were unsure why their account was shut down.

The largest social media platform with underaged kids in Australia was Instagram (1,088,980), followed by Snapchat (1,034,071), YouTube (643,670), TikTok (522,863), Facebook (455,054), Discord (222,189), and Twitch (24,466). Reddit wasn’t able to provide any numbers.

When setting up a social media account, users have to submit their date of birth. Most services solely rely on users’ truthful self-declaration, no additional age verification or assurance tools were used.

To bypass this age verification process, children often enter a false date of birth. In some cases parents will agree to help set up an account for their child with a false age, due to pressure to enable their children to access services and fear that their child may struggle socially.

A series of questions were sent to YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Reddit, Discord and Twitch on how they deal with underaged kids. These platforms told the researchers they would spend more time and energy in further developing existing tools for assessing users’ ages.

There are processes in place to report a user that’s younger than 13. However, they are rather complicated and it take numerous steps to submit a report.

In November 2024, Australia’s House of Representatives approved a bill banning the use of social media under the age of 16. Goal is to combat both mental and physical harm social media platforms have been demonstrated to cause with young children.

“I want to see kids off their devices and onto the footy fields and the swimming pools and the tennis courts. We want them to have real experiences with real people because we know that social media is causing social harm,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said at the time.

“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,” eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant stated.

The ‘Children and Social Media Survey’ recommends that service providers should review their systems and processes early and often. In addition, they should look to develop and implement technical or other interventions across the entire user experience of a service, including limiting or mitigating reliance on self-declaration at the point of sign-up to a service.