False safety : half of social media child safety features aren’t working

Picture Credits: Spacetalk

Social media platforms have spent years promoting new safety tools designed to protect children and teenagers online. But a new independent study suggests many of those features are falling short of their promises.

Researchers from the Cybersafety Research Center, a joint initiative between New York University and Northeastern University, tested 86 youth safety features across TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube. Their findings were striking: only 35 features, or just over 40%, worked as intended while also being easy enough for young users to find and use. The remaining features were either ineffective, difficult to access or failed to activate altogether.

The researchers created both child and adult test accounts to examine how the platforms responded to situations involving cyberbullying, harmful content, self-harm searches and unwanted contact from adults. Among the most concerning findings, Instagram failed to trigger its advertised "pause and rethink" prompt for certain bullying comments, while TikTok and Snapchat allowed searches for dangerous content to be bypassed using simple spelling variations. Researchers also found that adult users could still contact minors under certain conditions despite platforms claiming such interactions were restricted.

The report arrives as pressure continues to mount on major technology companies over child safety. Earlier this year, Meta and YouTube were found liable in separate legal proceedings for practices that allegedly contributed to youth addiction and harm, while all four platforms continue to face thousands of lawsuits related to children's wellbeing. The findings are also likely to add momentum to renewed calls in the United States for stricter federal regulation of social media companies, with industry executives expected to face further scrutiny in Congress later this year.

The companies strongly disputed the report's conclusions. Meta described the research as "fundamentally flawed," arguing that many of its safety tools were misunderstood or intentionally bypassed during testing. TikTok, YouTube and Snapchat similarly defended their existing safeguards, pointing to parental controls, default privacy settings and age-based protections already built into their platforms. Nevertheless, researchers maintain that effective safety features should work by default, be simple for teenagers to use and consistently prevent harm without relying on parents or users to manually activate them.

As social media becomes increasingly embedded in young people's daily lives, the study highlights a growing challenge for both regulators and technology companies. While meaningful safety features do exist, researchers argue they remain the exception rather than the standard. The debate now shifts from whether online safety tools exist to whether they are genuinely capable of protecting the users they were designed for.