It has been discovered that over a third of children in the UK have found a way around age verification measures implemented as part of the 2023 Online Safety Act - which requires pornographic and social media sites to check the age if people looking to use them.

The research found that one in six parents have helped their children get past age verification checks, with some kids "tricking" platforms into thinking they are older than they actually are.

One parent even revealed that they had caught their children in the act of drawing on facial hair in an attempt to bypass the technology.

One mother said: "I did catch my son using an eyebrow pencil to draw a moustache on his face, and it verified him as 15 years old."

The report from online safety organisation Internet Matters revealed that around half of children said they had recenly been asked to verify their age whilst using the internet.

From a sample of 1,000 kids in the UK, 46 per cent revealed that they believed age checks are easy to bypass - with 32 per cent admitting that they had done so.

Experts also found that 49 per cent of the children in the study said they had recently encountered harmful content on the web.

The report explained that the Online Safety Act is "beginning to shape children's online environments for the better" and urged the government to hold regulations and platforms to account on the issue.

It said: "Children continue to encounter harmful content at unacceptable rates, while age verification measures are often ineffective in practice or easy to bypass.

"Government must ensure existing legislation is properly enforced and hold both regulators and platforms to account where it is not. It must also address gaps in the law without delay."

A spokesperson for UK media regulator Ofcom said: "This report underlines why the Online Safety Act matters. Without protections like robust age checks, children have been routinely exposed to risks they didn’t choose, on services they can’t realistically avoid. Weak or easily bypassed age checks are not good enough.

"In the UK, our rules make tech firms responsible for keeping the platforms children use safer. While progress is being made, we’re clear that there is still more to do.

"We’ve challenged the biggest services in the world to do more to protect children, and won’t hesitate to act where they fall short."