Congress Shocked to Discover 10 Year Olds Check the ‘I’m Over 18’ Box Online
TikTok CEO Shou Chew testified before Congress on Thursday in a four hour hearing about the social media site's impact. The hearing, which is somehow still going on as I write this, has been equal parts embarrassing and ludicrous. During the hearing, various members of Congress invoked the sanctity and security of America’s children as a driving concern. Members of Congress depicted America’s kids as both vulnerable to the overwhelming influence of the world’s most popular social media site and also as so savvy they could easily circumvent TikTok’s various safety features, sometimes within the same breath.
Rep. John Sarbanes (D-Maryland) noted that kids these days spend a lot of time on TikTok, so much so that it might make them depressed. He worried that TikTok was designed to get kids addicted. He asked Chew to commit to making TikTok less addictive.
Chew noted that his company had already introduced systems that, based on the user's age, would limit screen time to 60 minutes a day. Sarbanes cut off his answer.
“My understanding is that teens can pretty easily bypass the notification to continue using the app if they want to, “Sarbanes said. “Let’s face it. Our teens are smarter than we are by half. They know how to use the technology and they can get around these limits if they want to. Are you measuring how many teens continue to exceed the 60 minutes of time on that app?”
Sarbanes isn’t wrong. TikTok uses an age-gating system to determine a user’s age. It’s essentially self reported. The app does, however, have systems in place that allow parents to take more active control of their child’s TikTok account. It’s possible, and even likely, that kids and teens are circumventing these controls all the time. It’s easy to get a new email account and a new TikTok account your parents don’t know about.
This problem is an ancient one on the internet. Most websites that age gate content do so by asking the user to submit their birthdate or click a box promising they’re of age. To do more would require people to upload data to websites in a way that people generally see as a privacy violation. Imagine if you had to upload a driver’s license or credit card number to sign up for TikTok. Data privacy, of course, was another talking point Congress repeatedly hammered during the hearing.
Later, Rep. Buddy Carter—a Republican from Georgia—asked Chew if TikTok was collecting biometric data on teens by watching their eyes. Chew explained that TikTok was not.
“How do you determine what age they are then?” Carter said.
“We rely age-gating as our key age assurance…which is when you ask the user what age they are,” Chew said. “We have also developed some tools where we look at their public profile to go through the videos that they post to see whether…”
“Well that’s creepy. Tell me more about that,” Carter said, cutting him off and referring to the practice of watching publicly posted TikToks on TikTok.
“This is a real challenge for our industry because privacy versus age assurance is a really big problem,” Chew said.
“You keep talking about the industry, we’re talking about TikTok here,” Carter said. “We’re talking about children dying.”
Technically, children younger than 13 are not supposed to be using a vast majority of the internet in the U.S. Thanks to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), there’s a restriction on websites collecting the personal information of any children younger than the age of 13. This is why you sometimes get a checkbox on a website asking if you’re of age. It’s an ass-covering measure by tech companies looking to avoid getting sued when, inevitably, kids end up online.
Age-gating doesn’t work and never has. As Sarbanes pointed out, kids can get around these controls. The problem isn’t unique to TikTok either. Kids routinely sign up for Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and other social media sites, often with the help of their parents.
Congress has been complaining about this fact of internet life since well before TikTok existed. In 2006, MySpace was the social media site parents and legislators feared. Like today, it called executives and witnesses to testify before a committee hearing about six people who were caught using fake profiles on the site to seduce kids.
"Don't tell me it can't be done. If we can put a man on the moon, we can verify age," Richard Blumenthal, a current Senator from Connecticut, said in Congressional testimony back in 2006 when he was the State’s attorney general.
The last time America put someone on the moon was 1972. No one has been there in fifty years. It will likely be another 50 before someone invents a method of verifying the age of internet uses without an unpalatable invasion of privacy.