"Stronger action is needed from both government and industry to ensure that children can only access online services appropriate for their age and stage and where safety is built in from the outset, rather than added in response to harm," Internet Matters CEO Rachel Huggins said.
Survey snapshot: what Internet Matters found
Internet Matters surveyed more than 1,000 UK children and their parents and concluded that months after new age‑check requirements under the UK Online Safety Act (OSA) took effect, the safeguards are not reliably keeping children away from harmful material. Key figures from the group's findings: 46 percent of children said age checks were easy to bypass, just 17 percent said they were difficult to fool, and 32 percent admitted they had actually bypassed the checks. Meanwhile, 49 percent of children reported encountering harmful content online recently.
Techniques children report using to beat age gates
The methods the survey records are basic and blunt. Children reported entering fake birthdays, using someone else's ID card where required, or substituting a video game character to trick video‑selfie systems. The report even quotes instances of children drawing a mustache on their faces to fool age detection filters. These anecdotes underline that the barriers are being treated as procedural hurdles rather than meaningful protections by many young users.
Parents’ role: active help, passive allowance, or informed supervision?
Internet Matters found that parental behaviour is a significant factor. Seventeen percent of parents admitted to actively helping their children evade age checks, and a further 9 percent said they turned a blind eye. The report recounts parents’ explanations that they sometimes judged the activity safe based on their understanding of the risks and their knowledge of the child, or that they preferred to permit access where they could supervise. That mix of active assistance and tacit tolerance reduces the practical effect of age gating.
How the Online Safety Act’s age checks are performing
The OSA introduced stronger age verification requirements for parts of the online ecosystem, but Internet Matters’ data suggests those measures do not yet translate into reliable child protection. Nearly half of children saying age checks are easy to bypass, and nearly one in three admitting to bypassing them, are outcomes the group's report highlights as evidence the OSA’s current measures are falling short on this specific objective: keeping children from accessing harmful content online.
What this means for the prime minister, social media firms, and parents
- The prime minister — the report notes recent talks between the prime minister and social media firms about tackling online harms — is positioned by Internet Matters as having an immediate opportunity to press for stronger measures.
- Social media firms and other online services are called out implicitly: Internet Matters says safety should be "built in from the outset, rather than added in response to harm," signalling that technical and design changes at platform level are the lever the group wants to see used.
- Parents and children remain the frontline practical reality. The survey portrays a landscape where parental supervision, active assistance, or indifference all shape whether age checks function as intended; nearly one in five parents are directly helping children bypass protections, according to the report.
Internet Matters’ chief executive framed the moment as a chance to act: she described the prime minister's talks with social media firms as "a timely opportunity for positive change." That phrasing sums up the report’s prescription: the group wants both government and industry to do more to make age checks meaningful rather than symbolic. The data it provides — high rates of perceived ease of circumvention, concrete examples of simple spoofing tactics, and substantial parental facilitation — leave a clear challenge for policymakers and platforms who must now show whether age verification under the OSA can be turned from a label into a practical barrier.
