Children are drawing moustaches on their faces to fool online age checks - and it's working

By Theo Farrant Published on 04/05/2026 - 15:24 GMT+2 Share Comments Share Facebook Twitter Flipboard Send Reddit Linkedin Messenger Telegram VK Bluesky Threads Whatsapp

A new report reveals that children across the UK are outwitting online safety measures with fake birthdays, borrowed IDs, and some surprisingly creative facial hair.

A third of children say they have bypassed online age checks in the past two months - some by drawing fake moustaches on their faces to trick facial recognition software.

ADVERTISEMENT ADVERTISEMENT

The report from Internet Matters titled The Online Safety Act: Are Children Safer Online? surveyed 1,270 children aged 9-16 and their parents across the United Kingdom to see whether the country's landmark online safety legislation is delivering any meaningful protection for children.

One mother told researchers she caught her son using an eyebrow pencil to draw a moustache on his face to pass a platform's facial age estimation check. It worked. He was verified as 15. He was 12.

What did the report find out?

The study discovered that 46% of children believe age checks are easy to bypass, while only 17% say they are difficult.

Among the infiltration methods children described were entering a fake birthdate, using someone else's identification, submitting videos of other people's faces, and using video game characters to fool facial recognition tools.

Related

• Australia adds age checks for AI chatbots, adult games and search engines
• EU finds Meta violates digital rules by not doing enough to keep children off Instagram and Facebook

"I've seen clips of people online where they'll get clips of video game characters like turning their head and use it for age verification," one 11-year-old girl told researchers.

Older children were more confident about circumventing checks, with 52% of those aged 13 and over saying age verification is easy to beat, compared with 41%of those aged 12 and under.

The most common reasons children gave for bypassing age checks were to access a social media platform they were not old enough to use (34%), to join an online game or gaming community (30%), and to use a messaging app (29%).

The report also found that just over a quarter of parents - 26% - have allowed their child to bypass age checks, with 17% actively helping them do so. Parents said they did this when they felt confident the content was appropriate for their child.

"I have helped my son get around them. It was to play a game, and I knew the game, and I was happy and confident that I was fine with him playing it," said one mother of a 13-year-old.

Is the Online Safety Act actually working?

The UK's Online Safety Act came into force in July 2025, which required social media platforms, gaming sites and other services to implement age-appropriate safety measures.

There are signs the legislation is having some effect. Around 68% of both parents and children report noticing new safety measures on the platforms children use, including improved reporting tools, content warnings, and restrictions on features such as livestreaming.

However, nearly half of children (49%) said they had experienced harm online in the past month, including seeing violent content (12%), content promoting unrealistic body types (11%), and racist, homophobic or sexist content (10%) - all of which should be prohibited under the Act's Children's Safety Codes.

Children in focus groups also described seeing videos of the assassination of right-wing political activist Charlie Kirk on their social media feeds. "I saw it on Snapchat. I broke down into tears and then told my mum immediately," said one 14-year-old girl.

The report recommends that children's safety be built into online platforms from the outset rather than added in response to harm, that access be determined by the level of risk a platform presents, and that access "should be tailored to their stage of development, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach".

It also stresses the role parents play in child safety and that they should be provided with "guidance on how to set up parental controls, through to clear, accessible explanations of how algorithms work and influence what children see online".

Go to accessibility shortcuts Share Comments

Read more

Tech News

Can AI simulate human cells? Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s plan