Key Points:
- Nearly half of UK children believe online age verification is easy to bypass, using methods such as drawing fake mustaches with eyebrow pencils or submitting videos of video game characters.
- A new report from Internet Matters surveyed 1,270 families to evaluate the effectiveness of the UK’s Online Safety Act, which came into force in July 2025.
- Despite the legislation, 49% of children report experiencing online harm in the past month, including exposure to violence, such as videos of the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
- Over a quarter of parents admitted to allowing their children to bypass age checks, with 17% actively helping them do so for games or platforms they deemed safe.
Tech-savvy children across the United Kingdom are using remarkably creative tactics to outwit new online safety measures. From borrowing adult IDs to drawing on fake facial hair, a new report reveals that the UK’s landmark online safety legislation is facing serious challenges from the very children it aims to protect.
The report, titled The Online Safety Act: Are Children Safer Online?, published by the online safety organization Internet Matters, surveyed 1,270 children aged 9 to 16, alongside their parents. The research was designed to measure the real-world impact of the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA), which came into force in July 2025 and requires tech platforms to implement age-appropriate safeguards.
The findings highlight a massive gap between regulatory intentions and the digital reality. According to the study, 46% of children believe age checks are easy to bypass, while only 17% find them difficult. A third of the children surveyed admitted to actively bypassing age-verification systems in the past two months.
The methods used to trick the system range from the simple to the absurd. While many children reported simply entering a fake birthdate or uploading a parent’s ID, others resorted to tricking facial recognition software.
One mother told researchers she caught her 12-year-old son using an eyebrow pencil to draw a fake mustache on his face. The crude disguise worked perfectly, tricking a platform’s facial age estimation software into verifying him as 15 years old.
Other children use digital workarounds to beat the cameras. “I’ve seen clips of people online where they’ll get clips of video game characters, like turning their head and use it for age verification,” one 11-year-old girl told the researchers.
Confidence in beating the system grows with age. The report found that 52% of children aged 13 and older view age verification as easy to circumvent, compared to 41% of children aged 12 and under. The primary motivations for bypassing these checks are to access restricted social media platforms (34%), join online games or gaming communities (30%), and use messaging apps (29%).
Surprisingly, the report revealed that parents often act as accomplices. Just over a quarter of parents (26%) admitted to allowing their children to bypass age checks, and 17% actively helped them do it. Parents generally justified this behavior by stating they had reviewed the specific game or content and felt confident it was appropriate for their child.
“I have helped my son get around them. It was to play a game, and I knew the game, and I was happy and confident that I was fine with him playing it,” said the mother of a 13-year-old boy.
Despite these workarounds, the Online Safety Act is showing some signs of progress. Approximately 68% of parents and children reported noticing new safety features on platforms. These changes include more prominent reporting tools, increased content warnings, and restrictions on potentially risky features such as livestreaming and direct messaging. Furthermore, 54% of children noted that the content they have seen recently appears more child-friendly.
However, the legislation has not yet eliminated the core dangers of the internet. Nearly half of the children surveyed (49%) reported experiencing some form of online harm within the past month. This included exposure to violent content (12%), material promoting unrealistic body types (11%), and racist, homophobic, or sexist posts (10%).
The algorithms powering social media feeds remain a significant point of concern, often pushing distressing news content to young users who are not actively seeking it. During focus groups, children described the trauma of having graphic videos, such as the assassination of right-wing political activist Charlie Kirk, suddenly appear in their feeds.
“I saw it on Snapchat. I broke down into tears and then told my mum immediately,” a 14-year-old girl told researchers, highlighting the emotional toll of algorithmic content delivery.
The Internet Matters report concludes that the Online Safety Act has not yet delivered the “step change needed to improve children’s online safety meaningfully.” The organization recommends a shift in how platforms approach young users. Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach or adding safety features only after harm occurs, the report argues that child safety must be built into the core design of platforms from the outset.
Furthermore, the report emphasizes that access to content and features should be tailored to a child’s specific developmental stage and determined by the actual level of risk a platform poses. Finally, Internet Matters stresses the vital role of media literacy and parental involvement, urging tech companies to provide clear guidance on parental controls and accessible explanations of how their algorithms influence what children see.
