Meta再次呼吁应用商店实施年龄验证机制

As more regions consider teen social media bans, Meta has again expressed concerns about such restrictions and released a new policy overview, clearly stating that bans are unlikely to be truly effective unless enforcement mechanisms are universal and effective.

In this newly released material, Meta's Global Head of Safety, Antigone Davis, outlined the key challenges of keeping teens off social media apps and introduced existing tools that can be used to address these challenges.

Davis said: "For any such proposal to succeed, apps must know the user's age. However, proving age on the internet remains a complex, industry-wide challenge."

Davis noted that many teens do not hold traditional government-issued identification documents, and requiring users to upload sensitive personal files to every individual app poses significant privacy risks.

"Furthermore, smaller or emerging platforms often lack sufficiently robust security infrastructure to protect this data, which could inadvertently put millions of people's information at risk of exposure," Davis added.

Meta has repeatedly raised this issue as a key topic. The company has consistently emphasized that under the current system, every independent app would need to verify the age of every user. However, if age checks could be done at the app store level, it would establish a more unified age verification process and shift the responsibility to Apple and Google to confirm user age before app downloads. Meta believes this approach would be more effective.

Davis reiterated this point in this overview, though she wanted to emphasize the core issue: current age-check proposals would lead to inconsistent enforcement and therefore lack real impact.

"Australia's under-16 social media ban precisely highlights the complexity of this logistical challenge," Davis said. "Because the policy was rolled out without an established, privacy-protective age verification method, it has led to the unintended consequences safety experts had worried about: reports show teens bypassing inconsistent age checks, circumventing restrictions, and moving to unregulated apps and gaming sites not covered by the ban."

It is precisely because of these privacy concerns that Irish authorities are exploring an alternative approach: promoting an expanded digital identity system to provide teens with a means of age verification.

However, overall, the bigger concern with the Australian model is that the measures it introduced have not produced actual results.

Australia's eSafety Commissioner released a report in April assessing the first three months of the country's under-16 social media ban. Response data showed that approximately 70% of underage teens were still accessing and using social apps.

Current measures have encountered almost no resistance; young users' technical skills are sufficient to bypass most of the age-check methods that have been implemented.

As Davis wrote, the solution cannot simply be laws that restrict teens. An effective approach also needs to consider the feasibility of social media bans and how apps can actually use these measures to keep teens out.

Therefore, the answer lies in all platforms having to comply with some agreed-upon method or approach, thereby ensuring the effectiveness of legal enforcement, rather than relying on each platform to do its best to restrict teen access.

Or, as Meta has repeatedly emphasized, implementing app-store-level restrictions.

Davis further reiterated this point: "There is a practical framework that directly addresses the complex logistical challenges I have outlined: centralizing age verification and parental approval at the app store level. App stores are already the gateway through which teens access every app on their phones. And we don't have to start from scratch. Apple and Google already collect age information when parents set up their teens' phones, and they already have systems in place to obtain parental approval before teens make purchases. We are simply asking to extend this mechanism to all app downloads."

Meta's proposal has merit, but Apple and Google continue to resist the concept because it would place legal liability for all violations on them.

But as Davis said, it does solve the major challenge of universal enforcement.

"By verifying a user's age once at the device level, the phone itself can serve as a single, secure central checkpoint," Davis said. "This way, parents can seamlessly approve or deny downloads across all platforms at once, without users having to upload sensitive personal files to dozens of independent apps."

However, even as this proposal is still under discussion, more regions are considering implementing teen social media bans.

Spain, France, Denmark, Portugal, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Thailand, Indonesia, and Austria are all exploring stricter restrictions similar to Australian law, and many other regions are studying their own options, with these proposals at various stages of implementation.

This week, according to Reuters, Canada also advanced its next step in teen social media regulation. Similar to Australia, the ban would make it illegal for those under 16 to access social media apps.

However, like Australia, Canada's move is also not expected to work, because the problem is not the legal text itself, but the actual enforcement of such measures.

From this perspective, Davis makes a reasonable point, once again emphasizing Meta's push for app stores to take on age verification responsibility.

As for whether governments are willing to take on Apple and Google and their massive lobbying teams head-on, that remains to be seen.