Some 20,000 children under age 13 get kicked off of Facebook for lying about their age every day.
That came out during testimony by one Facebook’s privacy advisors, Mozelle Thompson, before Australia’s parliamentary cyber-safety committee, according to the Daily Telegraph.
Facebook’s rules require users to be at least 13 years old, but like Thompson said to Parliament, as quoted by the paper:
There are people who lie. There are people who are under 13 [accessing Facebook]. …Facebook removes 20,000 people a day, people who are underage… It’s not perfect.
An Australian member of Parliament suggested that Facebook ought to require teenagers to obtain parental permission to join the site. We applaud that general idea but in practice wonder how a company could possibly enforce something like that.
Facebook plans to hire an Australian-based policy person who would deal with this issue among others, effectively mirroring what the Washington D.C. staff do for the social network in the capitol of the U.S. But policing underage users of the site would have to compete for that staffer’s attention with a host of other concerns.
Readers, what do you think Facebook should do about the large number of underage users on the site?
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