In the three months after Australia's ban on social media accounts for under-16s took effect last December, researchers at the University of Newcastle followed more than 400 adolescents to see what actually changed. The headline finding: more than 85 percent of participants under 16 said they were still using social media. Some had never been caught by the age checks in the first place. Others had simply logged back in through an older sibling's account, a parent's login, or a platform that had not yet tightened its verification. Meanwhile, the platforms themselves reported deactivating more than 5 million accounts nationwide to comply with the law. Both things are true at once, and that gap is the story.
Australia's law, the first of its kind anywhere, requires platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube to take "reasonable steps" to stop under-16s from holding accounts, or face fines. Age verification at that scale is a genuinely hard technical problem — face-scanning age estimation, ID checks, and behavioral inference all have real error rates and real privacy costs — and platforms have leaned on the least invasive tools first, which are also the easiest for a motivated 14-year-old to route around.
More than 5 million accounts were deactivated to comply with the ban. A University of Newcastle study of adolescents found more than 85 percent were still using social media anyway.
Canberra's answer, announced in late June, is not to soften the law but to sharpen it: raise the maximum penalty for platforms that fail to stop under-16 accounts to A$99 million, and give the eSafety Commissioner power to compel companies to hand over evidence of what verification steps they've actually taken. A box-ticking law becomes a law with teeth, or that's the intent. On March 31, the regulator opened formal investigations into all five major platforms over suspected breaches — the first real test of what "reasonable steps" means in practice.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese put the enforcement push plainly: big technology companies, in his telling, aren't doing enough to comply, so the answer is more pressure, not a rethink of the law. Regulators in the UK and the EU, and several Asian governments drafting their own youth social media rules, are watching this rollout as the first live test of whether a ban like this can be enforced nationwide or whether it mostly produces the look of enforcement — deactivated accounts, a compliance headline, and a workaround a teenager finds within a school term.
Millions of accounts really did come down. Platforms are under formal investigation for the first time. None of that has changed what most 15-year-olds do after school — which is presumably why the fines are going up before the ban has even finished its first year.