The modern world provides all of us (okay, almost all of us) with incredibly wide opportunities to access a wide variety of information, useful and useless, boring and exciting. And it’s not surprising that often the locomotive of this access is youth and even kids. But the problem is that openness to everything new often implies the opportunity to extract almost any personal data from the child.
Of course, almost all popular services, like TikTok or Instagram, have age restrictions, but if you google how to bypass these restrictions, anyone will perhaps find more than one or two methods. Of course, the function of parental control still remains, but this is a question for the parent’s consciousness. Well, or their relatives - as it happened, for example, with the user u/SocialMediaPoliceTAW, whose story we’ll tell you today.
The author of the post, according to his words, has an elder sister who has a 11 Y.O. daughter
Image credits: Karolina Grabowska (not the actual photo)
Once the family came to his place for barbecue and the niece was spending literally all her time on her phone recording videos
Image credits: u/SocialMediaPoliceTAW
It turned out that the girl had a TikTok account despite being under the age limit, but the mom thought it was okay
Image credits: cottonbro studio (not the actual photo)
Image credits: u/SocialMediaPoliceTAW
The author then checked everything and found out that the girl used her government name for creating her account
Image credits: Monstera Production (not the actual photo)
Image credits: u/SocialMediaPoliceTAW
So the man firstly reported his niece for being under 13 - but then started to feel remorse over getting her blocked
So, the Original Poster (OP) has an older sister, who in turn has an 11 Y.O. daughter. And so, when one day the whole family came to the author's place for a barbecue, the man noticed that his niece was spending almost all her free time on her smartphone, recording numerous videos for TikTok.
Well, at first the author thought ‘not my kid - not my problem,’ but then he decided at least to talk to his sister about it - after all, the lower age limit for TikTok is 13 years old. The woman, however, blithely brushed off her brother, saying that the daughter was old enough to realize what was safe and what was not.
Then the OP asked the niece directly what she was doing, but the girl said that it was just TikTok, and that her uncle is old and wouldn’t get it. Never mind that the original poster works in tech, and is well versed in how scammers can gain access to personal data and whatnot. The relatives left, and the author decided to check everything on his own.
And so, it turned out that the niece not only registered on TikTok, bypassing the age limit, but also created an account for herself under her government name. Moreover, using the links in the profile, one could also go to the girl’s account on Instagram and YouTube. And given the specifics of some TikTok trends, the OP reflects, there are many things that kids of her age shouldn’t do.
In general, after thinking a little, the man simply reported the niece for being under 13 - all her accounts on social networks and services. And a few days later, his sister called him and asked him ‘as an IT guy’ to check the daughter’s iPad - apparently she couldn’t log into any of her social media profiles. Every one of the services now required her ID.
And at that moment, our hero began to be overcome by doubts - no, not so much about whether he had acted appropriately, but about whether he should tell his sister that he was the reason for the blocking. Or would it be simpler to suggest that she submit the ID knowing it’ll get the girl permabanned?
Image credits: Mikhail Nilov (not the actual photo)
We conducted a kind of experiment and found out that, yes, some of the methods for bypassing age restrictions on TikTok really work, and that, in principle, an underage person can register an account. At the same time, according to the TikTok 'Guardian's Guide', “If we believe someone under 13 – or 14 in South Korea and Indonesia – is using TikTok, we'll ban their account and they may appeal if they think we have made a mistake." In other words, apparently, the OP’s niece could try to prove that this was, for example, her mom’s account.
At the same time, according to recent Pew research, almost two-thirds of American teens today use TikTok (and 16% use it all the time) - even despite many concerns (and sometimes quite justified) about the safety of the service per se, and some of its trends in particular. Yes, this spring, the service, largely under pressure from the authorities and the public, introduced a new limit on screen time for minors, but this only may spur them to look for workarounds, as they always do.
The vast majority of people in the comments to the original post also praised the author for being prudent, and strongly recommended that he not tell anyone to what he did. Not to his niece, not even to his sister. “Parents don’t dare to want to ‘parent’ anymore. They just want to be the ‘cool mom’. It’s pretty sad,” one of the folks wrote in the comments.
Commenters are also deeply concerned that, according to the author of the post, his niece literally had a meltdown over her blocked accounts. On the one hand, as some people rightly note, now the girl can simply create another account to replace the blocked one. However, there is another side to this - at least she will not be able to use her government name for this probable new account.
In any case, the general opinion of almost all commenters is pretty much unanimous: “Let it ride. No need to let anyone know what you did.” And what do you think about this? Did the original poster do the right thing, and should he admit what he did - at least to his sister? Please let us know your points of view in the comments below.
However, most people in the comments just praised the man for being prudent - and advised him not to admit his deed to anyone
