Black market for underage social media accounts puts platforms on notice

Black market sellers have emerged offering pre-verified social media accounts for as little as $50 to help under-16s bypass Australia’s world-leading minimum age laws.

A black market of age-verified social media accounts targeting desperate under-16s cannot be allowed to flourish, with the online safety chief putting platforms on notice.

Websites and Facebook groups have emerged selling pre-established social media accounts ahead of Australia’s world-leading minimum age laws, which came into effect on Wednesday.

Leading cyber safety expert Susan McLean said the industry that helped influencers buy followers has grown to appeal to the hundreds of thousands of young people now kicked off social media.

“I’ve seen ads promoting ways to avoid the ban if you buy an account for as little as $50,” she said.

eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant told The Courier-Mail she had first considered the prospect of a black market “a while back”, and it had been discussed with social media companies.

She said platforms had “very, very sophisticated” age inference systems and had been on notice for years over the rising number of fake and impostor accounts.

“Mostly because they’ve allowed organised criminal gangs, those who are engaging in sexual extortion, to totally weaponise their platforms and colonise them through the use of fake and impostor accounts,” she said.

“And there have been some estimates that (for) Facebook and Instagram, about a quarter of their user base are fake or impostor accounts.

“So if they actually purged them, they would be undermining their potential revenue stream.”

The eSafety Commission will from Thursday send out information notices, asking platforms for the number of under 16 accounts active on December 9 compared with on December 11.

Snapchat has emerged as the easiest platform on which to circumvent the age ban.

Over the next few months, platforms will also be asked how they will prevent recidivism.

“You know, the continued creation of fake or impostor accounts, which they can pick up based on IP address and other signals and then reverify, but then how are they going to prevent under 16s in the future from setting up accounts?” Ms Inman Grant said.

“We’re looking at what they’re doing on the 10th, but we’re also looking forward … and we’ll be monitoring numbers and we’ll be looking for abnormal patterns or different surges.”

Snapchat has emerged as the platform where children have had the easiest time bypassing age verification checks.

Ms McLean said she had witnessed the system fail first-hand, with primary-aged children able to verify their age on Snapchat.

“Every single person I know of that had to verify their age on Snapchat has passed and not one of them was over 16,” she said.

“Children and the platforms themselves have done what was asked of them, so they can’t be held to account.”

A Snapchat spokesperson said: “Throughout this debate, we expressed concerns about the technical challenges that the government and companies would face in trying to effectively prevent young people from accessing online platforms.

“This is one such challenge.

“We continue to believe there are better solutions to age verification that can be implemented at the primary points of entry, such as the operating system (OS), device, or app store levels.

“In the meantime, parents may report an account if their child is not 16 and we will suspend it.”

Originally published as Black market for underage social media accounts puts platforms on notice