The Digital Loophole: Evaluating the Effectiveness of Child Age Verification Methods on Social Media

Social media platforms are an integral part of daily life for nearly five billion people worldwide. However, the growing presence of underage users on these platforms raises significant concerns regarding children's exposure to harmful content and its impact on their mental health. This paper examines the effectiveness of age verification measures implemented on leading platforms Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and X. We evaluate the age verification processes required for account creation by simulating the registration steps for minors on these platforms. We also compare these methods to best practices in online age assurance in finance, betting and public transportation sectors. IEEE provides a standard for evaluating the age assurance of a platform or service. Our study benchmarks each platform's approach against the IEEE standard for robustness. Our research identifies gaps that allow underage users to easily bypass existing age restrictions, with particular practices such as allowing disposable emails and basic browser refreshes further weakening self-declared age checks. The findings highlight the need for more robust age verification measures by social media applications to support their stated age limit policies. This work emphasises the urgent need for stronger and more reliable age verification methods to align the digital age of consent across EU member states and beyond with the minimum age requirements on social media.