Meta fails to ban children on Facebook and Instagram, rules the EU

The Commission announced the decision on Wednesday after approx a two-year investigationstating that Meta does not have adequate measures to prevent children under the age of 13 from accessing its services, or to identify and remove those already on its social media sites. A common example is that minors can enter a fake birthday by registering on Facebook and Instagram to falsely claim to be over 13 years old – the minimum age specified in the Meta results – without any controls to verify their real age.

“What is happening at Meta shows that their services are not intended for children under the age of 13,” EU technology chief Henna Virkkunen said in a statement. “However, our preliminary findings show that Instagram and Facebook are doing very little to prevent minors from accessing their services.”

The tools available on Facebook and Instagram to identify children under the age of 13 are also “difficult to use and ineffective,” according to the Commission, after finding that even a 13-year-old user. and report, often there is no real follow up to remove the child from the platform. These concerns put Meta in breach of DSA rules that require “prompt identification and mitigation of risks” to children under 13 using its platforms.

The EU declaration describes the meta-analysis that causes the risk of protecting children from being exposed to inappropriate age as “insufficient and inconsistent.” The committee says that it is against “substantial evidence from the European Union” which shows that 10-12 percent of children under the age of 13 are accessing Facebook and/or Instagram.

“Furthermore, Meta seems to have ignored the readily available scientific evidence to that effect young children are at risk The committee said.” Research into the effects of Facebook and Instagram on “children’s behavior patterns,” which have been established along with age verification studies, is ongoing.

Meta now has the opportunity to fix the breach, the Commission is calling on Instagram and Facebook to update their risk analysis methods and use multi-year verification tools. If Meta fails to do so and is hit with a non-compliance ruling, it could risk fines of up to 6 percent of its annual global revenue. This could be as high as $12 billion, given Meta’s revenue of $201 billion by 2025.

Meta says it doesn’t match the EU’s initial findings The Guardian:

“We are confident that Instagram and Facebook are designed for people aged 13 and over and we have ways to identify and remove accounts from anyone under that age. We continue to invest in technology to find and remove young users and will have more to share next week about other measures that will be implemented in the near future.”