Is social media safe enough for kids? Not only do parents ask this question when making the important decision to let their children use social media products, but regulators and courts around the world are asking as well. In an effort to answer this question, we conducted the first independent audit of advertised child safety tools from four major platforms: Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube. We released our findings in a new report: Broken, Buried, or Missing: Anatomies of Failure (and Success) of Social Media Child Safety Features.
Our research team evaluated each feature by asking two simple questions: does it work as described, and can a child realistically use it? Features were categorized as failures if they were buried in settings, broken, or in some cases missing altogether. We found severe disparities between some advertised claims and the reality of safety tools on every product we tested. Across all four platforms, approximately 60% of their advertised child safety tools are broken, buried, or simply missing. That’s 51 of 86 tested features!
Just a few examples of what we found: On Snapchat, adult accounts were able to find and message teen accounts with no restrictions. On TikTok, a teen account that had searched for eating disorder content was then prompted to search for terms like “how to pretend to eat your food.”
Better, safer social media is possible, but much more work remains to be done. We hope our report can be an important step in the long journey toward safer social media products for children.
To learn more check our blog post here and read the full report here.
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