The accounts of more than 415,000 users in Australia identified as being under 16 were locked or disabled by Snapchat as part of its compliance with the under-16s social media ban.
The company announced in a blog post on Monday that, as of the end of January, it had disabled or locked more than 415,000 Snapchat accounts in Australia belonging to users who either declared an age under 16 or the platform believes to be under 16 based on age detection technology.
“We continue to lock more accounts daily.”
Snapchat was one of 10 platforms required to ban people aged under 16 from accessing its services in December last year. In January, the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, heralded the success of the ban in announcing that 4.7m accounts on these platforms had been disabled or removed in the first days of the ban.
Sign up: AU Breaking News email
However, there have been a number of reports since the ban came into effect, with some reporting Snapchat’s facial age estimation was easily bypassed by teenagers.
The company said it continues to lock more accounts daily but said there are “significant gaps” in the implementation of the ban that could undermine it.
“There are real technical limitations to accurate and dependable age verification,” Snapchat said, pointing to the age assurance technology trial last year finding facial age estimation technology was only accurate within two or three years of a person’s actual age.
“In practice, this means some young people under 16 may be able to bypass protections, potentially leaving them with reduced safeguards, while others over 16 may incorrectly lose access.”
Snapchat said there were also other apps where users communicate that escaped the ban, meaning teenagers would turn to alternative, less regulated, messaging apps.
“While we don’t yet have data to quantify this shift, it’s a risk that deserves serious consideration as policymakers evaluate whether the law is achieving its intended outcomes,” Snapchat said.
While the government named 10 platforms initially required 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 since the ban came into effect has been on those first 10 platforms.
“We’re a small team, by necessity we are going to focus where the preponderance of young people are – where there are more than 250,000 for instance, is one measure,” the eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, told reporters last month. “A lot of the other smaller companies that we’re looking at have about 100,000 users. And so this will continue to be a work in progress. We’re not done by any means.”
Snap, like Meta, has called for app store-level age verification.
Last month, Inman Grant said she was looking for systemic issues with the rollout, and the age assurance technology needed to improve, and noted Snapchat had been using facial age estimation without a “liveness test” which checks it is a real image.
“What’s really important is that these companies are deploying them in the right way,” she said. “And if they don’t have the right settings, or they’re setting the calibrations too high, that is where they’re going to likely have false positives.”
Inman Grant said eSafety would be sending a number of notices to companies on how they are complying with the ban.
While the total number of account deactivations since the ban came into effect is 4.7m across the 10 platforms, it is understood this includes not just accounts identified as being under 16 but includes historical, inactive and duplicate accounts that have been removed.
Aside from Meta and Snapchat, none of the other platforms have said how many accounts they have deactivated and the eSafety commissioner has declined to provide a breakdown.
