Campaign criticises Meta for lowering WhatsApp age limit

Social media giant Meta has been urged to reverse the lowering of the minimum age to use WhatsApp.

The change, which reduces the age limit from 16 to 13, came into force in the EU and UK on Thursday.

Campaign group Smartphone Free Childhood said the move by Meta, which also owns Facebook and Instagram, was “tone deaf ”.

“WhatsApp is putting shareholder profits first and children’s safety second,” co-founder Daisy Greenwell said.

“Reducing their age of use from 16 to 13 years old is completely tone deaf and ignores the increasingly loud alarm bells being rung by scientists, doctors, teachers, child safety experts, parents and mental health experts alike.

“Among parents, WhatsApp is seen as the safest social media app, ‘because it’s just messaging, right?’ And in that way, it works like a gateway drug for the rest of the social media apps.

“If you’re messaging your friends on WhatsApp, why not message them on Snapchat?

“WhatsApp is far from risk-free. It’s often the first platform where children are exposed to extreme content, bullying is rife and it’s the messaging app of choice for sexual predators due to its end-to-end encryption.”

Conservative MP Vicky Ford, a member of the UK’s education select committee, said Meta’s decision to reduce the age recommendation without consulting parents was “highly irresponsible”.

UK prime minister Rishi Sunak told the BBC his government’s online safety act would give the UK’s regulator powers to ensure social media companies are protecting children from harmful material.

“They shouldn’t be seeing it, particularly things like self-harm, and if they don’t comply with the guidelines that the regulator puts down they will be in for very significant fines because, like any parent, we want our kids to be growing up safely, out playing in fields or online,” he said.

WhatsApp said the change was bringing the age limit in line with the majority of countries and protections were in place.

Meta this week unveiled a range of new safety features designed to protect users, in particular young people, from “sextortion” and intimate image abuse.

It confirmed it will begin testing a filter in direct messages (DMs) on Instagram, called Nudity Protection, which will be on by default for those aged under 18 and will automatically blur images sent to users which are detected as containing nudity.