US EditionAustralian trial says tech for social media teen ban can work
- The Australian government released preliminary findings on June 20 from an independent trial testing technologies for enforcing the under-16 social media ban starting December 2024.
- The ban was legislated due to concerns over children's online safety, requiring platforms to take reasonable steps to block underage users, with a last-minute amendment mandating alternative age verification methods.
- The eight-month trial, led by the UK-based Age Check Certification Scheme, tested 53 vendors’ age assurance tools including facial recognition, voice and hand movement analysis, which face accuracy challenges especially for minors around 16 years old.
- Face-Scanning technologies estimated children’s ages accurately within an 18-month margin about 85% of the time but frequently classified some 15-year-olds as adults in their twenties or thirties, with greater inaccuracies observed for young females and individuals with darker skin; one 16-year-old, Andy, received widely varied age assessments, ranging from late teens to late thirties across different tools.
- Despite imperfect technology, officials expressed optimism that a system using multiple methods can help protect children online, but experts and the public remain concerned about privacy, accuracy, appeals, and potential circumvention.
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Australia wants to ban children social media. Parents like this, critics fear that this will create completely new dangers on the Internet.
·Germany
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Australia social media teen ban software trial organisers say the tech works
Some age-checking applications collect too much data and no product works 100% of the time, but using software to enforce a teenage social media ban can work in Australia, the head of the world's biggest trial of the technology said on Friday.
·United Kingdom
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