Many child safety features in social apps don’t work, report finds

Child protection features in the most popular social media apps often don’t work as advertised, a new report has found.

Researchers at New York University and Northeastern University have tested dozens of security features promoted by Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube in recent years as the products have come under fire for enabling teen loneliness, bullying and sexual exploitation. The study found that in some cases, security tools appeared to be completely missing, while in others they were broken, easily bypassed or difficult to find.

Snapchat, for example, allowed adults to send message requests to children they didn’t know and suggested teenagers befriend adult strangers. Instagram has also made teenage accounts connect with unknown men. And TikTok, after promising to remove content that promotes eating disorders, recommended searches on teen accounts like “how to pretend to eat food.”

The findingsmany of which were replicated by The New York Times, come amid intense backlash against the social media industry. A series of lawsuits alleging harm to young users could cost tech companies billions of dollars, and several countries have announced bans on social media for children under 16.

Several tech leaders are set to testify to Congress next month about the effects of their apps on children. The companies say they’ve made their products safer over the years, pointing to parental controls and time limits for young users.

New research highlights the gap between companies’ assurances about child safety and parents’ and teens’ online experiences. The researchers combed through hundreds of company feature statements and found that the language often suggested the platforms were doing much more to prevent harm than they actually were, said Lexie Matsumoto, a graduate student in computer science at NYU and an author of the study.

“They have words in there like, ‘We’re making it harder’ or ‘We have measures to protect against this,’ without actually describing those measures,” she said.

In 2023 Snapchat he said teens needed to have “a few mutual friends with another user” before they could appear in search results or be suggested as that person’s friend. And in 2025 society he announced more “protections for younger users to help prevent strangers from finding and contacting their profiles.”

But when the researchers logged into the adults’ Snapchat accounts, they were able to find and send friend requests to the teens’ accounts by searching for the teen’s username. The app also often recommended strangers to the teens’ accounts. The Times replicated the findings nearly a month after the study’s authors reported them to the company.

A spokeswoman for Snap said the researchers who deliberately tried to bypass security measures did not represent typical users. She added that the app warns teenage users to be careful when someone outside their network tries to contact them.

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On Instagram, teen accounts are private by default, a feature that researchers praised. Yet when they tested a new account for a teenage girl, they found that the recommended people to follow page consisted almost entirely of profiles of those who looked like grown men. A new teen account created by The Times also featured suggested profiles of unknown adults, both male and female.

A spokeswoman for Meta dismissed the idea that Instagram’s security tools had been broken. “The reality is that teenage accounts mean teens see less sensitive content, experience less unwanted contact and spend less time on Instagram at night,” she said.

Three platforms — YouTube, Instagram and TikTok — have created notifications to limit the time teens spend on the products. But the researchers found that these warnings were easily ignored. For example, when a teen’s YouTube account reached the 60-minute limit for watching short videos, the platform immediately offered a link to change the limit, as well as an option to “ignore the limit for today.”

A YouTube spokeswoman said parents can set time limits on short videos that their children can’t bypass.

All platforms have promised to reduce the ability of teens to find content related to self-harm or eating disorders. But on TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram, users could get around this by slightly modifying their search terms — for example, using “eating disorder” instead of “eating disorder.”

A teen’s TikTok account looking for eating disorder content would then be prompted to search for terms like “mental anguish,” “blade skin” and “anna’s food tips,” a common shorthand for anorexia, the researchers found.

When a Times reporter tested the platform with a teenage account in late June, after researchers informed TikTok of the problem, the company partially fixed it: recommendations for harmful search terms were gone. After several diet searches, the suggested content page was flooded with images of young women showing off their collarbones, congratulating themselves on not eating, and offering “toxic wl motivation,” referring to weight loss.

A TikTok spokeswoman said the app has more than 50 teen safety features turned on by default, and the company regularly removes content that celebrates disordered eating. TikTok has additional restrictions for users under the age of 13, a feature that researchers have found to work well.

Anneke Buffone, a psychologist who worked at Meta until January, when she left to found a non-profit focused on youth safety, said social media platforms had not invested enough in trust and safety teams, leaving those workers stretched and unable to fully address issues with those functions.