Why is 13 the minimum age for a social media account?

Zucked if you know? Read on....

We live in an age of risk assessments and health & safety. Our children can't visit the local museum without a top-to-bottom risk assessment being done and everyone in a high-vis. If you're a parent who assumed ‘age thirteen’ had been just as carefully risk assessed - and was about *their* safety - that’s totally understandable. Why wouldn’t we think a ubiquitous product, marketed to teens, had been through all the checks and balances? But this age has nothing to do with safety features or suitability. It's the age big tech businesses can legally make money out of our children’s data and target them with the ads. 

Thirteen is the legally acceptable age to have a social media account on TikTok, Snapchat & Instagram. WhatsApp have just lowered their minimum age from 16 to 13 (February 2024). Even though not many kids are begging to hang out on Facebook or LinkedIn, here’s what LinkedIn have to say : “The minimum age for a LinkedIn membership is 13, so most high-schoolers (and even some middle-schoolers!) can get a head start on making a name for themselves.”

Why have they all magically landed on this age?

Age 13 is from the 1998 US law ‘The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA)’ This law obviously predates social media: it was intended to prevent online platforms from collecting the personal data of kids under the age of 13 for targeted advertising, tracking & email marketing.

This 1998 law was intended to protect the personal data of children being used by companies. At 13, a child is considered old enough to have their data used and so be targeted by advertising. It is not an age picked for safety or for social media. It’s not even a UK law.

Under 13s were considered too young by COPPA to be targeted. Social media platforms specify thirteen because under 13s’ data can’t be used. In other words, their data can’t legally be used so they aren’t part of the business model.

In April 2023 TikTok was fined £12.7m by the UK data regulator for illegally processing the data of 1.4 million children under 13 who were using its platform.

In 2022 Irish regulators fined Instagram €405m for violating children's privacy “the long-running complaint concerned children's data - particularly their phone numbers and email addresses.” (BBC News Instagram fined).

We don’t know how much social platforms make from their teen users because they don’t release this data but a recent study estimated it was over $11 billion in the USA alone in 2022. What this shows us is that getting thirteens, and over, on to the platform and staying there is good business. Under 13s, not so much.

The UK Online Safety Act did not change the age specification for social apps. They adopted the age set in the USA in 1998. I wrote to the MP Michelle Donelan - Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology - to ask why it wasn’t being reviewed. I asked what risk assessments the UK government had done to confirm that age 13 was the right age to create a social media account, when ,if ever, it had been debated by our MPs. Who had been involved in that decision to set the age at 13 -safeguarding experts, police, teachers, psychologists, gambling / addiction experts?

The Conservative manifesto has not committed to increasing the age children should have access to social media. France and Spain have both committed to raising the age to 16.

Did you know about this age specification? Let me know in the comments your thoughts about social media and our children.

p.s you can find me on Instagram @WeNeedToTalkAboutSocial

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