00:00Social media companies say they've spent years building tools to keep your kids safe online.
00:05Researchers just tested 86 of those tools and most of them failed.
00:10So are these features actually protecting children or just protecting the company?
00:14Here's what's happening.
00:15A research group called the Cyber Safety Research Center, run jointly by NYU and Northeastern,
00:21looked at the child safety features on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube.
00:25They made dummy accounts pretending to be kids of different ages,
00:28then they checked whether each safety tool did what the company promised
00:32and whether a kid could actually find it and use it.
00:35Out of 86 features, only 35 passed.
00:39That's just about over 40%.
00:40Every single platform failed at least half of its own security tools.
00:45Some were even buried so deep in the settings that no real kid would find them,
00:49and others plain just didn't work.
00:51On Instagram, the researchers had one teen account post bullying comments at another saying,
00:57nobody likes you, and the app's famous pause and rethink warning never popped up.
01:02And this matters because these are the exact tools that companies point to when Congress asks if kids are safe.
01:08The researchers say the harms here are not hypothetical and the damage can be permanent.
01:13The platforms push back.
01:15Instagram says the rethink prompt was never meant to fire between two accounts that already follow each other,
01:21so to them it worked as designed.
01:23And the researchers aren't buying that.
01:25They say a safety feature only counts if it's on by default,
01:28withstands a typical teenager trying to bypass it, and actually prevents harm.
01:33By that standard, most of these don't.
01:35Executives from the top platforms are expected back on Capitol Hill this summer to answer for these failures.
01:41So, who should be held responsible for keeping kids safe online?
01:45The company that built the app, or the parent that handed over the phone?
01:48Drop your take in the comments and follow us here for more.
