This is really baffling to me, because social media sites have an age limit of 13 in most western countries.
...and this is by the companies themselves, if they are found out to be "marketing to children", they get hit with a whole another set of legal issues. Epic just got hit with this because of Fortnite and has to pay over $200M fines.
The only issue is that there is zero oversight on the age limit, there is no way to report underage users on social media sites - and even if there is, nothing happens until someone goes through the courts.
How are girls actually using social media? My impression is that the problem isn't so much obsessively posting as merely scrolling through content, thus a social media account for the purpose of infinite-scrolling isn't necessarily going to appear to be for someone underage or even be surfaced to anyone who would even care enough to report it.
Obsessively posting is really common. Kids’ friends post all the time, especially including Snapchat. It seems bizarre to me as there may be 10-20 posts per day per kid.
This is surprising to me too as Google and social media sites have methods for approximating age so they should be able to easily discern all the under 13s using their products.
I expect that at some point law firms will invest enough to do a class action suit to show these tech firms knowingly allowed and even marketed to under13 kids.
That and it seems like as fraud as advertisers are paying to show ads to 13+ and they are being shown to kids.
This seems like a large amount of tort given tens of millions of kids.
Or maybe once more damages studies come out, state attorneys general will sue like they did for tobacco and opioids.
> if you're not the parent of this child, then we strongly recommend that you encourage a parent to contact us using the instructions above.
Given that the instructions are to prove ownership over the phone number as well as trying to at least somewhat link that to an underage child how exactly could this reasonably be accomplished by someone other than the parent? If you know enough to be confident that a given account is linked to a minor then there's basically zero chance that you won't also know of a way to contact their parents about it. Given the e2e nature of WhatsApp any other implementation would be akin to the "But think about the children!!!" reactionary calls to ban e2e encryption.
It's a way too common practice by kids to create WhatsApp groups with EVERYONE in their contacts as members.
Then you're just added to a group with complete randos who can immediately see your phone number and they can start posting whatever.
I've had cases where my kid has been added to a group along with older kids and their posts have not been exactly SFW. I've got zero recourse in those cases, I don't know who any in the group are. I taught my kid to remove themselves from any suspicious groups immediately and that has curbed it for now.
"we strongly recommend" jumps out to me as careful wording in a legal sense to avoid obligations on their side. They'd use different wording otherwise. "We didn't say people HAD to do exactly this. We still technically accept reporting of underage users by non-parents..."
...and this is by the companies themselves, if they are found out to be "marketing to children", they get hit with a whole another set of legal issues. Epic just got hit with this because of Fortnite and has to pay over $200M fines.
The only issue is that there is zero oversight on the age limit, there is no way to report underage users on social media sites - and even if there is, nothing happens until someone goes through the courts.