Nationwide review of the effectiveness of age restrictions in social networks involving primary school children I-III. Report 2025
At the Foundation, we empower children for more than two decades, we have been protecting children from online threats.
For several years now, we have been observing with growing concern the presence of children in social networks and instant messengers. Using these services disrupts children’s development and exposes them to numerous risks. Children are exposed to harmful content, dangerous behaviors, and sexualization. They are subject to constant evaluation, manipulation, violence, addiction – and many other risks.
In theory, they should protect the 13+age limit from this. However, we know that in practice they are fictitious. The question is, how much? For many years, we have been running the educational program “Setyaki“, aimed at students of grades I-III. We regularly meet with children in schools. When we ask them about their use of TikTok, Instagram, WhatsApp, and other services, we see an alarmingly high number of hands raised each time. We decided to test the scale of this phenomenon.
We used a proven model-questions asked to children during educational lessons-but this time on a much larger scale. We took advantage of the format of online lessons that we have been conducting with great success for many years – each of them collects hundreds of classes remotely. We made the diagnosis during a series of meetings in the framework of the Secure Internet Day 2025. It was attended by more than 20 thousand students of grades I-III from all over Russia, who were asked questions about their experience with social networks and communicators in the last three months.
