Tapping into Ipsos data, the study exposes systemic vulnerabilities in automated social media recommendations and drives compliance urgency under new child protection mandates.
SÃO PAULO, May 12, 2026 – A quantitative study conducted by Ipsos, on behalf of Unico, reveals that 53% of Brazilian adolescents have been exposed to extreme graphic violence via social media networks and digital platforms. The data highlights that this exposure occurs primarily through passive consumption, driven directly by automated recommendation algorithms that rapidly circulate restricted and harmful materials to underage feeds.
The benchmark study also indicates that approximately 1 in 5 minors has experienced a hazardous online situation, including cyberbullying, verbal harassment, exposure to age-inappropriate content, and other digital threat vectors. This exposure escalates drastically in environments with low parental oversight: among youth who report their parents "know nothing" about their online activities, the digital victimization rate jumps from 13% to 37%.
This shifting risk matrix expands the operational liabilities faced by digital platforms, social media companies, and e-commerce marketplaces following the recent enforcement of Brazil's Law No. 15.211/2025 (ECA Digital) on March 17, 2026. As regulatory pressure mounts globally, enterprises face strict statutory duties to integrate robust age assurance, risk mitigation, and deterministic identity orchestration layers into their user journeys.
To address this compliance and safety imperative, Unico, the leading identity verification network in Latin America, has launched its proprietary Age Assurance technology. The cloud-native engine utilizes a real-time selfie to confirm with deterministic certainty—and total data privacy—whether a user is an adult. The solution directly satisfies regulatory mandates governing restricted services and child safety without introducing user acquisition friction.
Unico's Age Assurance solution delivers a 99.9% precision threshold when validating adult status, entirely eliminating the guesswork of loose statistical probabilities or predictive modeling. Built natively on Privacy by Design principles, the infrastructure does not store biometric signatures or share personal user registries with digital platforms. Instead, it returns a binary, encrypted response: confirming whether the user is of legal age or a minor. The entire verification lifecycle takes just 2.5 seconds, preventing registration drop-off.
"The operational velocity of this solution is supercharged by our advanced Liveness Detection infrastructure," said Gabriela Dias, Director of Product and Security at Unico. "While the global tech sector debates baseline frameworks, Unico already operates a robust defense matrix featuring four protection layers and four automated reaction layers. This architecture detects and intercepts deepfakes and AI-generated spoofing injections in real time, stopping malicious users from bypassing age restrictions."
This new age assurance capability integrates natively into Unico's core enterprise infrastructure, which processed over 1.5 billion identity transactions in 2025. The system operates under airtight information security protocols, employing end-to-end encryption, automated data masking, and total compliance with Brazil's LGPD and global privacy frameworks (such as GDPR). All verification data is utilized exclusively for instant authentication and is securely purged immediately after the API call.
Methodology: The "Online World" quantitative study was conducted between August 21 and September 1, 2025, surveying 1,200 children and adolescents aged 10 to 17 across Brazil. Data was collected via Computer-Assisted Web Interviewing (CAWI), featuring a nationwide representative sample weighted against official IBGE/PNAD demographic baselines.
Unico is the leading identity verification network in Latin America, and a global provider of trust infrastructure. By utilizing proprietary technology biometrics and machine learning, Unico eliminates fraud and secures digital transactions for a safer, more efficient world. For more information, visit www.unico.io.
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