They Know Exactly Who You Are
Just Not If You’re 13
By Harry Poloner
Last week, the biggest names in streaming and media gathered in New York for the annual Upfronts. The pitch to advertisers was confident to the point of swagger.
Amazon told the room the guessing game is over — their authenticated audience graph now reaches 90% of U.S. households. NBCUniversal outlined an AI strategy that lets brands align creative messaging with live content and capture audience engagement in real time with “precision, relevancy and speed.” Across every major presentation, AI-powered targeting and real-time measurement were positioned not as aspirational talking points but as table-stakes deliverables. These platforms know who you are, what you watch, what you buy after, and how to reach you in ways broadcast television never could. That is their product. That is what they sell.
This week, Ofcom published a report finding that TikTok and YouTube’s content feeds are “not safe enough” for children, and that both platforms had failed to commit to any significant changes to reduce harmful content being served to minors — maintaining that their feeds are already safe. Ofcom disagreed. So did its own data: 84% of children aged eight to 12 are still using at least one major platform with a minimum age of 13.
Read that number again. Eighty-four percent. These are children the platforms are not supposed to have. Children whose presence on the platform is a violation of their own terms of service. And yet there they are, being served content, generating engagement, growing the numbers that get presented at next year’s Upfronts.
Social media analyst Matt Navarra put the real issue cleanly: “The old debate was, ‘did the platform remove harmful content quickly enough?’ The new one has shifted towards, ‘why did the platform show it to a child in the first place?’” That is exactly the right question, and it is the one the platforms have the least interest in answering.
Here is the contradiction that should be asked out loud: the same companies standing on Upfronts stages boasting about authenticated identity graphs and precision targeting at scale are the ones telling regulators they cannot identify a 12-year-old on their platform. These are not separate technical problems. They are the same problem, with different business incentives attached. Knowing who your user is makes them monetizable. Knowing your user is a child makes them a liability. The infrastructure exists to do both. Only one gets built.
Ofcom chief executive Dame Melanie Dawes defended her agency’s pace but acknowledged the job was not done: “We’re talking about a twenty-year culture at Silicon Valley of not taking safety seriously. You can’t change that overnight.” That is a fair description of the problem and a generous framing of the solution. Twenty years is not an oversight. It is a business model.
The UK government’s consultation on whether to ban social media for under-16s closes on May 26, with next steps promised by summer. The Education Committee has already called for a ban, with its chair Helen Hayes MP saying social media firms “cannot be relied upon to self-regulate” and that only a statutory ban, alongside restrictions on addictive features for under-18s, would constitute a “total reset.”
Maybe. Or maybe the platforms agree to a compliance checklist, issue statements, and the number barely moves — the way it barely moved after the Online Safety Act came into force last July.
Not much has changed. The Upfronts keep happening. The reports keep coming. The children are still there.
Preach!