Months after Australia made it illegal for kids under 16 to use social media, surveys show most of them are still logging on. Now, the tech companies running the apps are sitting in front of lawmakers, asking them not to panic just yet.
Passing a law to keep kids off the internet is the easy part. Actually making it work is turning into a massive headache.
Months after Australia drew a hard line and banned social media for anyone under 16, the reality on the ground is messy. Early surveys show that roughly 80% of minors are still scrolling through their feeds. And now, the people running these apps are being dragged into a Senate hearing to explain why.
The executives from Meta, Google, TikTok, and Snapchat sat before Australian lawmakers this week. The mood in the room was tense. The government’s internet regulator dropped some heavy accusations, basically suggesting the tech companies were dragging their feet on purpose to show the rest of the world that this kind of ban is impossible.
Julie Inman Grant, who runs the eSafety office, did not hold back. She told the inquiry the platforms were “failing to prevent the creation and recreation of accounts.”
But she also asked for a little patience. “We are seeing change, but we need to give it time,” she said.
The tech companies pushed back hard on the early data. They argued that the tools used to guess if someone is exactly 15 or 16 are still being figured out. Most age-check technology was originally built for the 18-and-over crowd.
Rachel Lord, who handles government relations for YouTube, told the room not to jump to conclusions based on just a few months of numbers. “It is a point in time, it’s very early on, and we caution against over-reliance on that,” she said.
SEE ALSO: Meta removes 756,000 Australian teen accounts as social media ban comes under pressure
Then there is the problem of how these surveys are actually done. Mia Garlick, Meta’s head of public policy in Australia, pointed out that just because a kid tells a surveyor they use Instagram, it does not mean they actually have a registered account. They might just be looking at a public web page.
“There can be differences in terms of people accessing versus having an account,” Garlick told the inquiry. “Sometimes survey data is challenging in terms of stated versus revealed.”
To prove they are actually trying, the companies threw out some big numbers. Meta said it shut down 756,000 accounts suspected of belonging to underage kids. YouTube blocked about 740,000 accounts from signing in. TikTok said it wiped out 550,000 accounts when the law first started, and they keep removing about 24,000 more every single month.
The lawmakers are not fully buying it. They are already looking at a new bill that would double the maximum fine for breaking the rules to A$99 million. They also want more power to force the tech companies to hand over internal documents.
The tech companies call this an ongoing learning process. The government calls it a failure to comply. Somewhere between a teenager guessing a birthdate and a multi-million dollar fine, the real test of this law is just getting started. It is easy to pass a rule on paper. It is much harder to police millions of kids who just want to talk to their friends.
