UK kids bypass age checks with fake facial hair, new survey finds
As the United Kingdom works to make online spaces safer for children through age verification methods, kids are finding creative ways to skirt the rules, including drawing on facial hair to dupe facial recognition systems.
That's according to a new survey from U.K.-based online safety advocacy organization Internet Matters, which found that children in the United Kingdom are applying fake facial hair to bypass age-verification systems, following the implementation of new laws aimed at curbing kids' access to harmful online content.
Since 2021, Internet Matters has conducted annual surveys of more than 1,000 children and their parents across Great Britain, gleaning insights into kids' relationships with online spaces.
Measuring the Online Safety Act's impact
This year, the organization surveyed 1,270 U.K. children ‒ ages 9 to 16 ‒ and parents to understand changes in young users' online behavior following new rules in the Online Safety Act. Relevant to the survey was a slate of child safety protections, which came into force in July 2025, requiring service providers and platforms to use "'highly effective' age verification and/or age estimation technologies."
What the researchers at Internet Matters found is that just because guardrails exist, that doesn’t mean they’re strong.
'Youthful innovative spirit began well before the internet'
According to the report, 46% of children believe age-verification methods are "easy to bypass," compared to 17% who say they are difficult. Methods include using fake birthdates, Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), or submitting videos of "another person's face, or even a character, to trick platforms into estimating an older age."
Some kids don't need to get creative. About 26% of parents who participated in the survey admitted to allowing their children to bypass age checks, with 17% who said they actively helped their kids.
Whatever the approach, 49% of the children surveyed said they’ve "experienced harm online" within the past month, the researchers at Internet Matters noted.
Fostering safer online spaces
The implementation of the Online Safety Act's guardrails is evident.
Internet Matters' survey found that 68% of children and 67% of adults said they’ve seen more safety features available, including ways to report or filter content. Likewise, 53% of children said they’ve recently been asked to verify their age.
On whether the internet is becoming a "safer place," as Internet Matters described it, 39% of parents and 42% of children said it is.
"Positively, there are clear signs of progress with efforts to improve safety being noticed and supported by both parents and children, such as better reporting tools, more content labelling, and restrictions on certain platform functions," Rachel Huggins, Internet Matters' CEO, wrote in the report. "However, children continue to encounter harmful content at concerning rates, and age checks to manage their experiences online - while widespread - are often seen as easy to circumvent."
Huggins adds that despite the U.K. government’s best efforts, "parents continue to shoulder much of the responsibility for keeping children safe in an increasingly complex digital environment."
Age verification in the US
While the United Kingdom's age-verification laws apply nationwide, in the United States, the issue has largely been left to the states, starting with Louisiana in 2022.
According to the Free Speech Coalition, which actively tracks and lobbies against age-verification laws in the United States, 26 states currently have laws in effect, while dozens of other pieces of legislation are either yet to be implemented or still in consideration.
"Kids and teens are some of the most clever innovators when it comes to trying to do end runs around the rules of the adult world," Leah Plunkett, author of "Sharenthood" and a Harvard Law School faculty member specializing in the digital lives of children, told USA TODAY. "This youthful innovative spirit began well before the internet and will endure long afterward."
"A number of states across the U.S. are adopting or exploring age assurance models under existing or new state privacy and online safety laws," Plunkett added. "I think a growing number of states ‒ across blue, purple, and red political lines ‒ will be adopting age assurance as part of their state laws to protect minors online, and I think states should adopt these measures, as long as they are constitutional, ethical, and practical."
Plunkett believes parents can educate themselves about harmful online content and how easy it is for their children to access it ‒ whether intentionally or not.
"Parents who are worried about the content their children consume online can talk with their children about how to spot and avoid misleading, fake, or otherwise harmful content," Plunkett said. "Parents can also work on other digital citizenship skills with their children, such as putting away their devices so they consume content [in] old-fashioned ways, like books and talking to people face-to-face."
Drew Pittock covers national trending news for USA TODAY. He can be reached at [email protected].