Australia became the first country in the world to ban children under 16 from using social media. That was six months ago. A new study now shows that most of those children are still using the platforms anyway. The government says it wants to make the law stronger.
The ban came into force on the 10th of December last year. It required platforms including Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook and Snapchat to prevent Australian children under the age of 16 from holding accounts. Companies that failed to make meaningful efforts to enforce the rules faced fines of up to 49.5 million Australian dollars, equivalent to about $34 million US dollars.
The law was celebrated at the time as a bold step. No other country had gone that far. The Australian government said it was putting the safety of children above the commercial interests of technology companies. Supporters said it would reduce the harms young people face online. Critics said it was unenforceable from the start.
The new research suggests the critics had a point. Researchers at the University of Newcastle surveyed more than 400 young Australians before the law took effect and then again three months later. The findings were stark. Some 85 per cent of participants under the age of 16 were still using social media after the ban came in. Their behaviour had barely changed. The researchers concluded there was not enough evidence that the law had made any significant difference in its early stages.
The study found three main reasons the law was failing. First, the platforms themselves were not fully complying. Second, enforcement by regulators was incomplete. Third, young people were actively finding ways around the restrictions. Many were using virtual private networks, which disguise a user’s location, to make it appear they were connecting from outside Australia. Others were simply lying about their age. The study described the period since the law’s introduction as one of limited implementation and substantial circumvention.
Child safety advocates expressed frustration at the findings but also raised a separate concern. They argued that even a perfectly enforced age ban would not address the real problem. The harm young people face online, they said, comes largely from the content recommended to them by the platforms’ own systems. Stopping a 15-year-old from having an account does not change the fact that harmful material is still being promoted to users once they are online.
The government’s own regulator, the eSafety Commission, had already raised similar concerns before the study was published. In March, it flagged what it called significant worries about the compliance of Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube. Communications Minister Anika Wells was direct in her assessment. “Australia’s world-leading social media laws are not failing,” she said. “But big tech is failing to obey the laws. None of this is impossible. None of this is even difficult for big tech, who are innovative billion-dollar companies.”
Her words drew attention internationally but produced no immediate visible change from the platforms. Apple and Google were separately asked to stop allowing children to download the restricted apps through their own application stores. Neither company publicly confirmed it had done so in the way the government requested.
The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, responded to the new study on Friday. He told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that his priority was to make the laws as strong as possible and to ensure they could withstand legal challenges. “What we want to do is to make sure that the laws are as strong as possible and that they will withstand any legal challenges which are made,” he said. His government is now examining ways to tighten enforcement and close the gaps the research has exposed.
As reported, the experience has attracted close attention from governments elsewhere. Britain’s prime minister, Keir Starmer, has proposed restrictions that would go further than those in Australia. Canada’s government has introduced legislation to ban children under 16 from holding social media accounts. Both countries are watching what happens in Australia as they decide how to proceed.
The core difficulty Australia faces is a technical one. Verifying the age of an internet user with certainty is extremely hard. Most platforms use self-reported date of birth, which children can easily falsify. More robust systems, such as checking a user’s identity against government records, raise their own concerns about privacy and the collection of sensitive personal information. The eSafety Commission has been exploring what it calls age assurance technologies, but none has yet been deployed at the scale needed to make the ban effective.
The government has indicated it will conduct a formal independent review of the law within two years of it coming into force, as required under the legislation. That review is expected to produce recommendations on strengthening the framework. Until then, the gap between the law as written and the law as it is being lived by millions of Australian teenagers remains very wide.
