Smartphone Free Childhood call for WhatsApp to reverse age reduction policy

Smartphone Free Childhood, the grassroots parents’ movement, has called on WhatsApp to reverse today’s change in age policy, which lowers the minimum age of use from 16 to 13 years old. 

As of April 11^th, anyone in Europe over the age of 12 can now legally access the messaging service, after WhatsApp made a planned change to its age restriction policy. 

This comes despite growing national calls for greater protections for children around smartphone and social media use, including from the 60,000 parents who have joined Smartphone Free Childhood since it launched spontaneously eight weeks ago.

A recent nationwide poll found that 95% of parents said they wanted big tech companies to do more to protect their children, with 80% believing that age limits on social media were too low. 

Daisy Greenwell, co-founder of Smartphone Free Childhood said: “WhatsApp are putting shareholder profits first and children’s safety second.

“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. This policy boosts their user figures and maximises shareholder profits at the expense of children’s safety.

“Lowering their age restrictions from 16 to 13 sends a message to parents that WhatsApp is safe for those over the age of 12, and yet a growing body of research suggests otherwise.

“Meanwhile parents and teachers in the Smartphone Free Childhood community regularly reach out to us to share that it is a contributor to bullying, sleep disruption and access to harmful content.”

Meanwhile a growing body of research continues to raise serious questions about how suitable closed group messaging apps are for children and young teens. One recent study² found that 56% of students aged 8-18 reported that they had experienced cyberbullying in their class WhatsApp groups. 

Elsewhere, heavy use of screen media has been associated with shorter sleep duration and more mid-sleep awakening (in a study of more than 11,000 British children³) and many teachers have anecdotally reported to Smartphone Free Childhood that late night activity on WhatsApp is an increasing problem affecting children’s mood and ability to concentrate in class. 

Speaking about her recent report in partnership with the Association of School and College Leaders, Dr Kaitlyn Regehr Associate Professor of Digital Humanities at UCL said: “Our report shows that private, or closed, groups can enable more extreme material being shared, which in turn can have implications for young people’s offline behaviours.

“Young people increasingly exist within digital echo-chambers, which can normalise harmful rhetoric.”

Furthermore, numerous reports link WhatsApp to children accessing extreme content – including sexual imagery, self-harm material⁵ and videos of extreme violence such as beheadings and terrorist attacks. Studies proves that nearly a quarter of people viewing such content on social media will experience symptoms of PTSD⁶.

Meanwhile, the end-to-end encryption on WhatsApp threatens children’s safety on the app, making it hard for parents to understand who their children are talking to and leaving them at risk of grooming by sexual predators.

One in ten children report⁷ using the messaging site to talk to people they don’t already know, and one in six 14-16 year-olds have received something distressing from a stranger on the site. 

Despite these significant concerns, WhatsApp have as yet given no indication of how they plan to protect all the new under-16 users on their site, or how they will comply with UK law to remove the millions of under-13s already on the platform.