Facebook, Instagram To Crack Down On Users Younger Than 13

Earlier this week, a U.K. documentary series shed light on questionable, or even negligent, moderation practices committed by Facebook. One of the issues was that the site was allowing children under the age of 13 to have accounts, even though that is against the rules.

In response, Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram will start locking out underage users more frequently, TechCrunch reported.

Channel 4’s “Dispatches” series sent an undercover reporter to one of Facebook’s third-party moderation houses for an episode this week. Among other things, the reporter discovered that moderators were taught to ignore users who appeared underage unless they had an explicit admission that a user was underage.

The backlash to the “Dispatches” report led to a company blog post from Facebook promising to do better. Facebook has changed its moderation policy so any users believed to be younger than 13 will have their account locked until they can prove they are old enough to use the site. This applies to underage users that moderators come across on their own, as well as users who are reported for being underage or any other rule violation.

This also counts for Instagram, which Facebook owns. That is a bit more tricky since Instagram is much more popular with younger people than Facebook. Teens have left Facebook in droves in recent years, as many of their parents probably used the site just as much as they did. Instagram, meanwhile, has been in an arms race with Snapchat for the teen demographic for a while.

Sites like Facebook nominally prohibit access to kids under 13 as part of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Rule. However, it has never been difficult for children to lie about their ages upon making an account. As TechCrunch pointed out, this becomes a problem over time, as kids who lied about being older will be served ads for things like alcohol, since Facebook believes them to be older than they are.

The move is also somewhat contradictory, given the existence of a Facebook Messenger offshoot app specifically for children.

The crux of the “Dispatches” report concerned Facebook’s treatment of extremist pages on the social network. Popular pages full of hateful content were kept afloat despite numerous rule violations because they generated revenue for the site, according to Channel 4’s findings. Facebook’s blog post also promised to do better in that regard.