Snapchat blocks more than 400,000 Australian accounts but warns of ‘significant gaps’ in under-16s social media ban | Social media ban

The accounts of more than 415,000 users identified as under the age of 16 in Australia have been locked or disabled by Snapchat as part of compliance with the under-16 social media ban.

The company announced in a blog post On Monday, it announced that, as of the end of January, it had disabled or locked more than 415,000 Snapchat accounts in Australia belonging to users who self-reported their age as under 16 or believed to be under 16 based on the platform’s age-detection technology.

“We continue to lock more accounts every day.”

Snapchat was one of 10 platforms that banned people under the age of 16 from accessing their services in December last year. In January, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese heralded the success of the ban by announcing that 4.7 million accounts on these platforms had been disabled or removed in the first days of the ban.

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However, since the ban went into effect, some reports have emerged that Snapchat’s centenary age estimation was easily skipped by young people.

The company said it was continuing to lock more accounts every day, but said there were “significant gaps” in implementing the ban that could weaken it.

“There are real technical limitations to accurate and reliable age verification,” Snapchat said, noting that a trial of its age assurance technology last year found that its facial age estimation technology was only accurate to within two or three years of a person’s actual age.

“In practice, this means that some young people under 16 may bypass protections, potentially exposing them to reduced security measures, while others over 16 may inadvertently lose access.”

Snapchat said there were other apps where users communicated that evaded the ban, meaning young people would turn to alternative, less regulated messaging apps.

“While we don’t yet have data to measure this change, it’s a risk that should be taken into serious consideration as policymakers evaluate whether the law is achieving its intended results,” Snapchat said.

While the government has initially identified 10 platforms that must comply with the social media ban, all platforms with Australian users are expected to consider whether they need to comply. However, since the ban came into force, the eSafety commission’s regulatory focus has been on these top 10 platforms.

“We’re a small team, necessarily we’ll focus on where the majority of young people are – for example, where there are over 250,000 people is a measure,” eSafety commissioner Julie Inman Grant told reporters last month. “A lot of the other smaller companies we looked at have around 100,000 users. So this will continue to be a work in progress. We’re not done by any means.”

Snap, like Meta, has called for age verification at the app store level.

Last month, Inman Grant said he was looking for systemic issues with the rollout and that age assurance technology needed to be improved, noting that Snapchat was using facial age estimation without a “liveness test” that checks whether the face is a real image.

“What’s really important is that these companies deploy these correctly,” he said. “And if they don’t have the correct settings or set the calibrations too high, they’re likely to get false positives.”

Inman Grant said eSafety will send companies a series of notifications on how they are complying with the ban.

While the total number of disabled accounts across 10 platforms since the ban came into force is 4.7 million, it is understood that this includes not only accounts determined to be under 16 years of age, but also outdated, inactive and duplicate accounts that have been removed.

Other than Meta and Snapchat, none of the other platforms said how many accounts they had disabled, and the e-Security official declined to elaborate on this.