16% of Parents Help Their Children Bypass Online Age Checks, Study Finds. One 15-Year-Old Just Uses a Fake Moustache

More than a third of children in the UK have found a way around age verification measures for social media sites and other online platforms. And new research from online safety organisation Internet Matters suggests one in six parents have helped their child to get past age verification checks, with children reporting ‘tricking’ platforms into thinking they are older.

Parents also said they had caught their children drawing on facial hair in a bid to evade the technology. One mother said: “I did catch my son using an eyebrow pencil to draw a moustache on his face, and it verified him as 15 years old”… From a sample of 1,000 UK children, 46% said they believed age checks are easy to bypass, while 32% admitted to having done so.

49% of the children surveyed said they’d still encountered harmful content, according to the online safety activists. The group called the figure “unacceptable,” and complained that age verification measures “are often ineffective in practice or easy to bypass.”