The accounts of 415,000 users under the age of 16 in Australia have been locked or disabled Snapchat As part of enforcing the under-16 social media ban.
The company announced In a blog post As of Monday, the end of January, it had suspended or locked more than 415,000 Snapchat accounts in Australia belonging to users who were under 16 or believed to be under 16 based on the platform’s age detection technology.
“We keep locking more accounts every day.”
Snapchat was one of 10 platforms required to ban under-16s from accessing their services in December last year. In January, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese declared the ban a success It announced that there are 4.7 million accounts These platforms were suspended or removed during the first days of the ban.
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However, there have been several reports since the ban went into effect, with some reporting that teenagers easily bypassed Snapchat’s facial age estimation.
The company said it continues to lock more accounts every day, but said there are “significant gaps” in enforcement of the ban that could undermine it.
“There are real technical limitations to accurate and reliable age verification,” Snapchat said, pointing to an age assurance technology trial last year that found facial age estimation technology was only accurate within two or three years of a person’s actual age.
“In practice, this means that some young people under the age of 16 may be able to bypass safeguards, leaving them with reduced protections, while others over the age of 16 may be wrongly denied access.”
Snapchat said there are other apps that users communicate with that have escaped the ban, meaning teenagers turn to alternative, less regulated, messaging apps.
“While we don’t yet have the data to quantify this change, it’s a risk that deserves serious consideration as policymakers evaluate whether the law is achieving its intended outcomes,” Snapchat said.
Although the government initially named 10 platforms to comply with the social media ban, all platforms with Australian users are expected to assess whether they need to comply. However, the eSafety Commissioner’s regulatory focus has remained on those top 10 platforms since the ban came into force.
“We’re a small team, we focus on where there’s a predominance of young people – for example where there’s more than 250,000, that’s one measure,” the eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, told reporters last month. “Many of the other smaller companies we’re looking at have close to 100,000 users. So this continues to be a work in progress. We’re by no means done.”
Snap, like Meta, also calls for app store-level age verification.
Last month, Inman said she was looking for systemic problems with the grant rollout and that the age-verification technology needed improvement, and noted that Snapchat was using facial age estimation without a “liveness test,” which checks that it’s a real image.
“What’s really important is that these companies are implementing them the right way,” she said. “And if they don’t have the right settings, or if they’re setting the settings too high, that’s where they have false positives.”
Inman Grant said eSafety will send several notices to companies about how they are complying with the ban.
While the total number of account deactivations across the 10 platforms since the ban came into force is 4.7m, it is understood that this includes not only accounts under the age of 16 but also historical, inactive and fake accounts that have been removed.
Aside from that Meta And Snapchat, none of the other platforms said how many accounts they deactivated, and the eSafety Commissioner declined to provide a breakdown.
