Video sharing apps are commonplace in the daily life of teens. A study published by the Pew Research Center found that 93% of American teens aged 13-17 use a video sharing app such as TikTok, YouTube, Snap, Twitch, and nearly one in five teens use these apps “almost constantly” throughout the day.

The new report by Ofcom was done to shed light on the efforts made by these video sharing platforms in the UK to protect children from potentially harmful content. In the UK, these video sharing platforms are required to implement measures to safeguard children from videos that may negatively impact their physical, mental, or moral development.

To understand how they do that, the report focuses on three of the most popular regulated video-sharing services for children in the UK: TikTok, Snap, and Twitch, to understand some of the key challenges they face. 

The first major challenge for these apps is age verification and enforcement. Where most of these apps rely on self declaration to confirm the user is over 13, it presents an easy workaround for underage users. 

Once a user’s age is known, the platforms employ tools like AI and human moderators to enforce age restrictions in the content. This year, on TikTok, about 1.09% of its monthly active user base were removed for being identified as underage users. 

Other apps such as Twitch allow anyone of any age to access most videos, meaning it adopts a different approach, opting to classify and label content which is suitable for under-18s. In Ofcom’s report they found that Twitch had identified and removed around 0.03% of its total UK user base for underage users. 

TikTok and Snap both offer parental controls to give parents oversight in their children’s online activity in real time while using the service. According to Ofcom, seven in ten parents of children aged 5-15 are concerned about their children seeing  specific types of inappropriate content online.  

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“Parental controls are tools or systems that allow parents some oversight of and/or level of control over their child’s online activity,” read the report. However, “Implementation of parental controls cannot in isolation ensure child safety. Comprehensive child protection also relies on effective use of other safety measures including effectively and accurately knowing the age of users.”

The report comes on the backdrop of the Online Safety Act, which emphasises the importance of child protection. Under the new act, broader child safety measures will come into effect in spring of 2024, addressing some of the lapses in safety identified in this report.