The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has conducted a new study, the 100 Children Report which provides a fascinating insight into UK children’s real-world mobile phone and tablet use, the platforms and sites they visit and the ads they’re exposed to over the course of one week.
For this cutting-edge study, smart phones and tablets of 97 children across the UK were monitored to see exactly what ads they were being served in logged-in social media, on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube, and in other online environments.
Research findings suggest that over 3.6 million accounts owned by young people are misreporting their age when they sign up and 1.6 million of these accounts are falsely age-registered as 18 or older. Through these accounts, children were exposed to almost two-thirds more age-restricted ads than children registered with a child’s age (17 or younger).
To get a more complete understanding of how young people are using social media, the ASA also surveyed 1,000 children about the platforms they have accounts with and how they signed up to them.
The survey uncovered that children are signing up to social media at increasingly young ages, with a quarter misreporting their age when doing so. Parents are helping children under-13 to sign up to social media, despite being under the minimum age of registration, and most children access their profiles on devices only they use.
This research provides a unique and invaluable insight into what young people are actually seeing across social media platforms and other non-logged-in online environments.
Click here to read the report.