The first country to say “no” and the rest watching
On 10 December 2025, Australia did something no country had done: ban by law minors under 16 from having accounts on the major social networks. The online safety amendment law, passed in 2024, requires platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, X and YouTube to take “reasonable steps” to prevent under-16s from holding an account, including age verification, removal of existing users and prevention of new registrations through tools such as VPN detection. It was described as the world’s first blanket ban.
The problem the law tries to solve was of massive scale. About 80 percent of Australian children aged 8 to 12 used at least one social media platform in 2024, more than a million users below the minimum age, a figure that rises to 95 percent among teens aged 13 to 15. The usual minimum age to open an account was 13, but historically no one enforced it. The Australian law turned a decorative rule into an obligation with penalties.
The stated motive was protection against concrete harms. The law seeks to protect children from harmful content and addictive algorithms, and to reduce cyberbullying and grooming, amid rising rates of suicide and self-harm among Australia’s Gen Z. Prime Minister Albanese presented it as an act of family sovereignty against Big Tech. And precisely because it was the first, the whole world watches its results: what works or fails in Australia will define whether the ban becomes a global model or a warning.
The compliance numbers: half-and-half
Six months later, the data allow a first balance, and it is ambiguous. The compliance side shows large-scale activity. More than 4.7 million accounts attributed to under-16s were removed, deactivated or restricted as of mid-January. It is an enormous figure: in a few weeks, the platforms deleted or limited millions of accounts, something they had said for years was technically difficult.
But the non-compliance side is just as telling. The Australian regulator expressed “significant concerns” about five major platforms — Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube — and opened formal investigations ahead of possible enforcement actions by mid-2026. Many under-16s still have their accounts or can create new ones, and the regulator observed poor practices by some platforms in the first three months. The mass deletion does not equal full compliance: deleting accounts does not prevent others from being created.
The evasion was immediate and predictable. After the ban took effect, it was reported that many children managed to get around it in various ways. The available age-verification systems do not always accurately detect a user’s age. VPNs, borrowed documents, reopened accounts: the evasion repertoire is wide and cheap. The question the data raise is not whether the law removed accounts — it did, millions — but whether it removed access, which is different.
The most uncomfortable figure: harm did not move
There is one figure that is the real acid test of the law, and it is the most uncomfortable for its defenders. The key harm indicators remain unchanged, according to the regulator’s report. If the goal was to reduce cyberbullying, anxiety and self-harm, and those indicators did not move in the first months, the inevitable question is whether the ban attacks the cause or only the visible symptom.
There are several possible explanations, and the data do not yet allow choosing among them. One is that six months is too little to measure effects on mental health, which move in years, not weeks. Another is that minors who evade the ban remain exposed to the same harms, now without the supervision that accounts declared as minors’ at least allowed. A third is that the harm came not mainly from having an account, but from a broader digital ecosystem the ban does not touch.
That last hypothesis is the most troubling for policy design. If the problem is harmful content and algorithms, expelling minors from the platforms eliminates neither the content nor the algorithms: it only changes who sees them and how. A minor who migrates to unregulated platforms, or who accesses with a fake adult account, may end up more exposed, not less, because they lose even the design protections platforms apply to accounts identified as minors’. The ban could, in the worst case, push the harm into the shadows rather than reduce it.
The tension that defines the debate: age versus privacy
Behind the discussion about minors lies a conflict that affects all users, regardless of age. To prevent a minor from opening an account, you have to be able to verify the age of whoever opens it, and that means, in practice, verifying everyone’s age. Age-verification and assurance technologies, according to privacy campaigners, can undermine people’s anonymity online and cause leaks of sensitive information if not properly overseen. The protection of minors collides head-on with the privacy of adults.
The Australian regulator itself was aware of the risk and tried to contain it. The eSafety Commissioner warned that it would be unreasonable for platforms to reverify everyone’s age, suggesting platforms usually already have enough data to know whether a user is over 16. It is a delicate balance: verify enough to exclude minors without building a universal identification system that destroys anonymity. But the line between the two is blurry, and each platform draws it its own way.
The legal resistance was not long in coming, and it points to a fundamental right. The Digital Freedom Project announced legal action before the High Court against the law, arguing it violates the implied freedom of political communication enshrined in the Constitution, and the court agreed to hear the case in 2026. The argument is that restricting access to the platforms where much of public debate now happens limits a political right, not just a recreational activity. That court’s ruling will be as important as the compliance data.
What platforms fall and which do not
The scope of the ban is wider than the list of big networks suggests, and understanding what is in and what is out is key to judging its logic. The platforms banned for minors include Facebook, Instagram, Kick, Reddit, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, Twitch, X and YouTube. It is a list ranging from classic social networks to video and streaming, which shows a broad definition of “social media” for the law’s purposes.
But the boundary is not fixed, and that introduces a grey zone. The Communications Minister made rules on platforms excluded from the restrictions, amended in March 2026 to add criteria on what constitutes an age-restricted social media platform. The law had to define, on the fly, what counts as social media and what does not, because messaging, educational or gaming services could fall in or out depending on interpretation. That need to adjust the definitions months after passing the law reveals how hard it is to legislate on technological terrain that changes faster than the rules.
The regulatory scaffolding around it is broader than the ban alone. Six additional codes took effect on 9 March 2026, applying to app stores, equipment providers, social media services in their core and messaging functions, and designated internet services. The account ban for minors is, in fact, one piece of a larger regulatory system that also binds app stores and device makers. That layered architecture is part of what other countries will need to replicate if they want the ban to work, and it is far more complex than the headline of “banning social media for minors.”
The missing voice in the debate: the teenagers themselves
One aspect the compliance data do not capture is what the main people affected by the law think and experience. And there the picture is more nuanced than the adult consensus that drove it. Most teenagers interviewed by the Australian press opposed the ban and expressed skepticism about its effectiveness. The intended beneficiaries of the protection, in large part, did not ask for it nor believe it works, which poses a tension between the will to protect them and their own autonomy.
The unintended consequences on minors appear in the testimonies. Some teenagers reported feeling more isolated from communication after the ban, and others found very different content on the alternative platforms they migrated to. Isolation is the flip side of the safety argument: for many young people, social networks are also a channel for information, expression and belonging, and cutting it off abruptly has a social cost the law does not count. Migration to unregulated platforms, moreover, can expose them to worse content than the law meant to avoid.
The law’s political origin helps explain why the teenage voice carried little weight. The newspapers of News Corp Australia pushed a campaign titled “Let Them Be Kids” that publicized the experiences of parents who lost their children to bullying on social media and sought to introduce an age limit. The law was born of a media campaign centered on families’ pain, a powerful and legitimate emotional driver, but one that sidelined the perspective of young people themselves and the evidence on effectiveness. That genesis explains both the law’s political force and its blind spots: it was designed from parents’ anguish more than from data on what reduces harm.
The experiment goes global
Despite the mixed results, or perhaps without waiting for them, the Australian law is already being copied across half the world. Countries like France, the United Kingdom, Malaysia, Germany, Italy, Greece and Spain are studying similar bans or restrictions for under-16s. The speed of the spread is notable: a law six months old with still inconclusive results is becoming an international template before it is known whether it works.
Each country that adopts it faces the same obstacles as Australia, and some worse. Malaysia set an enforcement target for June but is still defining how platforms will verify age using official ID documents; Brazil passed a child safety law whose implementation was handed to an under-resourced regulator; and India is advancing state-level restrictions and national age-verification proposals, amid serious civil society concerns about surveillance creep. Verification by ID document, which several contemplate, is precisely the one that most alarms privacy advocates, because it turns access to a social network into an act identified before the state.
The European Union is the actor whose decision will weigh most. The European Parliament voted a resolution on how to better protect minors online, with 483 votes in favor, and the Commission is taking note of the Australian ban. Ireland, which assumes the EU presidency in 2026 and hosts much of Big Tech, is advancing its own proposal for identity verification and a “digital age of consent,” including a government age-assurance app. If the EU adopts a similar model, the Brussels effect will turn the ban into a de facto standard for hundreds of millions of users.
What the experiment teaches whoever legislates later
For the Latin American countries watching the phenomenon, the Australian case offers lessons before copying the law. The first is that deleting accounts is easy and fast, but eliminating access is hard and slow: the gap between the two is where the law is won or lost. A rule that produces headlines of millions of deleted accounts can, at the same time, leave intact the real access of minors through evasion.
The second lesson is about measurement. Australia had the merit of setting harm indicators and publishing them, which allows evaluating the law with data and not intuitions. A country that bans without measuring cyberbullying, self-harm or exposure to harmful content before and after will never know whether its law worked. The Australian experiment is worth it, above all, because it produces data; copying the ban without copying the measurement would be keeping the flashy part and discarding the useful one.
The third, and most delicate, is about the cost in privacy. Any country that adopts age verification must decide how much surveillance it is willing to impose on its entire population to protect a part of it. Verification by ID document offers certainty but creates a state record of who uses which network, a cost that in democracies with weak institutions or a history of data abuse can be greater than the benefit. The question the Australian case leaves on the table is not only whether banning protects minors, but at what price for everyone’s freedom, and whether that price is paid once or forever.
The balance of the experiment
Six months of the Australian law are not enough for a definitive verdict, but they are enough for an honest balance. The law proved it is possible to force platforms to act at scale — 4.7 million accounts is not nothing — and put digital child safety on the world agenda. But it also proved that evasion is trivial, that harm indicators do not move in the short term, and that age verification carries a privacy cost no society has fully resolved.
The provisional verdict is that Australia answered the easy question — can platforms be forced to delete minors’ accounts? — and left open the hard one: does that reduce the harm that motivated the law? As long as that second question has no data-based answer, the countries copying the ban are adopting a solution whose effectiveness has not yet been proven, with a privacy cost that is certain. The Australian experiment is valuable precisely for that: it is the first chance to learn, with real figures, whether the intuition to ban holds when it collides with the reality of evasion, harm measurement and everyone’s right not to be identified to enter a conversation. The rest of the world would do well to wait for the data before copying the slogan.