Children are using ways to bypass age verification systems designed to protect them from harmful online spaces, including social media.
Some children use false birth dates and others use their parents’ ID. They also point the camera at images of adult-looking video game characters.
According to , these findings focus on one of the world’s largest experiments in online child safety, which many countries are now considering adopting.
A Online Security Lawin the United Kingdom, was created to force platforms to make the Internet safer for children. Social media and gaming platforms have introduced stricter age checks, adult sites are seeing a significant drop in traffic from minors, and many parents report seeing more visible safety features.
It came into force in 2023, but its child safety codes came into effect in July 2025. These require relevant services, including social networks, gaming platforms, search services and adult content providers, to assess the risks to children and take measures to reduce exposure to harmful content.
carried out a survey of 1270 children from the UK aged between 9 and 16, as well as their parents. The investigation took place in September and October 2025, just a few months after child safety codes came into force, so the report presents a first snapshot of the effectiveness of these codes.
Nearly 68% of children and 67% of parents said they had noticed more online security measures. About half of the children reported that they had been asked to verify their age. Many children liked the changes, especially the easier ways to block or report users.
The objective is for online platforms to identify the user’s age and then adapt the digital to that child’s stage of development. A 10-year-old should not receive the same posts, direct messages, live streams, search results, or recommendations as a 16-year-old, much less an adult.
However, 46% of children surveyed said age checks were easy to bypass, and only 17% found them difficult. Among children aged 13 and over, the percentage who considered them easy rose to 52%.
It is known that 49% of the children interviewed had suffered some type of online damage in the previous month. This included violent content, hateful content, sexual content, bullying and requests for personal information.
One third of children claimed to have bypassed age checks for the previous two months. The most common method was to introduce a fake birth date.
Others simply used someone else’s login, another device, a fake ID, or random photos to pass facial age estimation.
Parents often want age verification mechanisms to be in place, but they also want flexibility when the system resorts to these measures, eventually allowing their children to bypass it.
Therefore, it is necessary more security measures for both parents and children to ensure stricter enforcement of rules and promote media literacy.
