I tried making new accounts as an under-16. Things are still messy

Some social media apps designated as age-restricted by Australia’s new laws appear to be struggling to vet new users, despite an effective ban on under-16s signing up to the platforms that comes into force on Wednesday.

Testing apps’ ability to block underage users is complicated because each uses its own age assurance measures, some of which are invisible to the user. This means that when a new user signs up for the first time, no matter when they say their birthday is, there will likely be a series of checks done in the background to verify that the person is over 16.

On But if I changed the date of birth to 1988, I was immediately allowed in without any facial verification or obvious age assurance measures.

Instagram wouldn’t let me create a new account for a user under 16 and would show error messages when I tried. In practice, I easily created a new account claiming to be born in 1997, but a long pause while agreeing to the terms and conditions suggested the system might be running a background check and was convinced I was over 16. When I tried to create an account claiming to be 16, it asked me to upload a photo of my ID.

I was able to create a new account on Reddit claiming to be 16 years old and no questions asked.

TikTok blocked the creation of a new account with a date of birth stating that I was under 16, then blocked the creation of any new accounts; This showed that my device or network address might have been blacklisted after the first try. Strangely, I was greeted with the same blocking message when I tried to sign up for Snapchat, so I couldn’t get any face verification or ID checks.

YouTube is an interesting case because it sent messages to existing users under the age of 16 explaining that they would be removed from the app. However, this morning I enabled YouTube for my eight-year-old son’s account without any problems; As of 10:00 AM he still has full access to the site. This may be because child accounts are linked to and managed by parent accounts, further complicating the way Google accounts work. Google said all viewers under the age of 16 will be automatically logged out.

I had never enabled YouTube for my son’s account before today, but he’s had a Google account for years, so this is probably an extreme case. I gave the account access to all of YouTube, but the account attributes her actual 2017 birth date, and you can see in the screenshot above that it’s already recommending videos to her based on her age.