From Phreaking to Sneaking: Children's Circumvention of Social Media Age Verification Systems

TL;DR

This study explores how children aged 12-16 perceive, understand, and evade social media age verification systems, revealing their active role in negotiating digital access and exposing weaknesses in current regulation.

Contribution

It introduces 'sneaking' as a theoretical lens to analyze children's practices of evasion and engagement with platform access controls.

Findings

Children see the ban as unfair and ineffective.

Participants learn how to evade age verification systems.

Technological controls struggle to address social and governance issues.

Abstract

Australia's social media ban is now in force. It requires platforms to take reasonable steps to stop users under 16 from holding accounts. Drawing on five focus groups with fifteen young people aged 12--16, this paper examines how children understood the ban's effectiveness, impact, and legitimacy as they encountered the platforms charged with enforcing it. Participants widely saw the ban as unfair and ineffective. Through platform access controls, they learned how the ban worked, where it failed, and how they and their peers could evade it. We also asked participants to imagine better approaches to age verification and youth digital governance. This paper develops sneaking as a theoretical lens for these practices. The concept names more than evasion: it captures the social encounter between children, platforms, techno-regulation, and the access controls that mediate digital participation. Our findings show that children are not passive subjects of platform regulation. They interpret, test, and negotiate digital infrastructure. They also expose a central weakness in age-based platform regulation: technological controls struggle to solve the social and governance problems they are asked to contain.