Ofcom has set out its recommendations for identifying which of the UK’s millions of social media users are over 16, ahead of a ban that comes into force in March next year.
Under it, under-16s will be prevented from accessing ten of the biggest platforms, including Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat. Many adults are also likely to have to confirm that they are not under-age.
Why this is harder than it sounds
Verifying an age boundary at 18 is relatively easy. Verifying one at 16 is not, and the regulator is explicit about why: 16 and 17-year-olds do not have credit cards or full driving licences, and may not have passports either. They can also look significantly older or younger than they are.
So the usual proof-of-age infrastructure, which is built around financial and driving documents adults happen to carry, does not reach the people this ban is actually about.
The four methods
In addition to traditional forms of ID, Ofcom recommends four it says would be “highly effective”:
Photo ID matching — information on a document such as a passport is checked against a live image taken during the age check.
Banking-based checks — using the information a financial institution holds about a user’s age.
Face age estimation — technology the regulator argues has recently improved.
Digital ID services — which let people digitally prove who they are, or provide a single fact about themselves such as their age.
All four are subject to government approval. The BBC has asked three of the UK’s biggest banks whether they would have a process for assisting with social media age requests if this became an official measure — a question worth watching, because a bank confirming a customer’s age to a social network is a new kind of relationship between two industries that currently share nothing.
The regulator is deliberately not telling anyone what to build
Ofcom chief executive Dame Melanie Dawes said the approach draws on the experience of introducing age checks across the porn industry last year.
“What we’ve learned in introducing age checks across the porn industry is that actually what a lot of countries did before us was say you need to do it this way and they were very prescriptive and it didn’t work,” she told the BBC. “So what we’ve said all along is here are things that can work, they must preserve privacy, they must protect people’s data, but it’s on you to put in place what you think works for you.”
The onus therefore sits with the platforms. That is a defensible regulatory instinct — prescribing a single technology in law tends to freeze it at the moment the law was written — but it also means ten companies will each decide how much identity data to collect from every adult user in Britain, and the privacy outcome will vary by platform rather than by rule.
The fight over whose job it is
Some tech companies, Meta among them, have called for age verification at device level, so an under-age user would be automatically blocked from installing social media apps through the app stores. That would place responsibility with Apple and Google, who between them operate most of the world’s smartphones. Apple has already introduced age verification in the UK.
Ofcom says that would not absolve the social networks from doing their own checks as well.
It is easy to read Meta’s position as buck-passing, and partly it is. But it is also the architecturally cleaner answer: one age check at the operating system, reused by every app, means one company holds the identity data instead of ten. The objection is that it hands two American firms a gatekeeping role over the entire app economy.
What Ofcom admits
Two things, and both are creditable.
It does not have a firm number for how many adults will need to prove they are not under-age, but concedes it will be a “large number of accounts” that companies must “deal with”. And it acknowledges that “the risk of circumvention cannot be entirely eliminated” — some children will get round the checks.
That matters because a similar ban was introduced in Australia last year and many children there found ways around it. The UK says it intends to take a tougher approach.
Dawes framed the goal generationally rather than technically: “I actually think the real prize here is going to be for today’s eight to 10-year-olds entering secondary school without it being the norm to go on Snap in your class group chat, without it being the norm to have all your sports fixtures organised on Instagram.”
That is an honest statement of what the policy is for. It is a bet on changing a default, not on building an unbeatable gate — and it should be judged on whether the norm shifts, not on whether every determined teenager is stopped.
The report now goes to government for a decision. Related: researchers are about to ask 1,500 British teenagers what adults send them in private messages — evidence that bears directly on what these rules are meant to prevent.
