Ms Frances Haugen:

Age verification is an interesting issue. It is a great example of where we do not necessarily need official enforcement with things such as driver licences in order to have much stronger protections for children under the age of 13 years. One of the most shocking things I have brought forward for many people is the idea that Facebook has an estimated age on every person on the platform and it uses that estimated age, which is different from somebody's stated age, to do lots of analysis to target them with things like advertisements. One can ask how Facebook is able to accurately predict somebody's age. Things like who the person's friends are helps one estimate the person's age because not all the person's friends lied when the person was 11, 12 or 13 years old if the person snuck on. Some of them waited until they were 13 years old. It also knows the person's interests. There are many ways to figure out approximately how old somebody is. Facebook has found that, for some age cohorts, 10% to 15% of that age cohort were on systems like Facebook at the age of ten years old. There has to be much stronger reporting. Imagine if Facebook had to report for every cohort of 14-year-olds what fraction of them were on the platform at 13, 12, ten and nine years old. It could be doing that right now and it would encourage it to be much more aggressive at finding underage people and taking them off the platform.

There are also systems such as facial recognition. I have been sent multiple studies by start-ups that are investing in facial recognition and analysing facial features for estimating people's ages. If we want to keep people under the age of 13 years off the platforms, I strongly encourage this because the rates of addiction in Facebook's own research are highest for 13 and 14 year olds. Young people have less ability to regulate addictive behaviours. That is why we do not let them smoke. Similarly, there should be much more stringent controls for things like gating how much time somebody under the age of 16 years old can spend on these platforms because the self-regulation systems are not as mature.