A recent study by the Cybersafety Research Center found that more than half of social media child safety features don’t work as intended. The researchers tested 86 youth safety features across TikTok, Instagram, Snap, and YouTube, and only 35 of them successfully met the criteria of being easy to find and use, and effectively preventing harm to children.

Methodology

The researchers created two sets of test accounts: those with birthdates associated with minors to test child safety features, and adult accounts ages 25 and older to test restrictions on interactions with children. They tested whether a young person using the platforms normally would encounter the features, whether a teen attempting to circumvent the features would succeed, and whether an adult user could bypass restrictions on messaging minors.

Features were categorized as failures if they were buried in settings and hard to find, broken because they did not function to prevent harm as advertised, or both. Nine features were also labeled as “missing” because researchers couldn’t trigger them even when they tried.

Findings

The report found that Snapchat had the highest feature failure rate at 73%, followed by Instagram at 66%, YouTube at 55%, and TikTok at 50%. The researchers also found that the platforms’ efforts to block adult strangers from messaging with young users were inadequate. On Snapchat, researchers using an adult test account were able to find and message a child account with no restrictions.

The report’s findings call into question social media companies’ claims that heavy investments in new tools and features have made their platforms safe for young people. The researchers argue that the features need to be on by default or easy to activate, be resilient to normal teenager use, and demonstrably protect against harm.

The companies largely disputed the report’s findings, arguing that their features work as intended or that the tests did not represent typical use of the platforms by kids and teens.

Original reporting: KEYT (Ventura/Santa Barbara) — read the source article.