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Australia has enacted a world-first ban on social media for users aged under 16, causing millions of children and teenagers to lose access to their accounts.
Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, YouTube, Snapchat, Reddit, Kick, Twitch and TikTok are expected to have taken steps from Wednesday to remove accounts held by users under 16 years of age in Australia, and prevent those teens from registering new accounts.
Platforms that do not comply risk fines of up to $49.5m.
There have been some teething problems with the ban’s implementation. Guardian Australia has received several reports of those under 16 passing the facial age assurance tests, but the government has flagged it is not expecting the ban will be perfect from day one.
All listed platforms apart from X had confirmed by Tuesday they would comply with the ban. The eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, said it had recently had a conversation with X about how it would comply, but the company had not communicated its policy to users.
Bluesky, an X alternative, announced on Tuesday it would also ban under-16s, despite eSafety assessing the platform as “low risk” due to its small user base of 50,000 in Australia.
Children had spent the past few weeks undertaking age assurance checks, swapping phone numbers and preparing for their accounts to be deactivated.
The Australian chief executive and co-founder of the age assurance service k-ID, Kieran Donovan, said his service had conducted hundreds of thousands of age checks in the past few weeks. The k-ID service was being used by Snapchat among others.
Parents of children affected by the ban shared a spectrum of views on the policy. One parent told the Guardian their 15-year-old daughter was “very distressed” because “all her 14 to 15-year-old friends have been age verified as 18 by Snapchat”. Since she had been identified as under 16, they feared “her friends will keep using Snapchat to talk and organise social events and she will be left out”.
Another parent said the ban had forced him to teach his child how to break the law. “I’ve shown her how VPNs work and other methods on bypassing age restrictions,” he said. “I’ve had to set her up with her own adult YouTube account and have assisted her in bypassing TikTok’s age-estimation and will keep doing so each time it asks.”
Others said the ban “can’t come quickly enough”. One parent said their daughter was “completely addicted” to social media and the ban “provides us with a support framework to keep her off these platforms”.
The Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, said in an opinion piece on Sunday: “From the beginning, we’ve acknowledged this process won’t be 100% perfect. But the message this law sends will be 100% clear … Australia sets the legal drinking age at 18 because our society recognises the benefits to the individual and the community of such an approach.
“The fact that teenagers occasionally find a way to have a drink doesn’t diminish the value of having a clear, national standard.”
Polling has consistently shown that two-thirds of voters support raising the minimum age for social media to 16. The opposition, including leader Sussan Ley, have recently voiced alarm about the ban, despite waving the legislation through parliament and the former Liberal leader Peter Dutton championing it.
The ban has garnered worldwide attention, with several nations indicating they will adopt a ban of their own, including Malaysia, Denmark and Norway. The European Union passed a resolution to adopt similar restrictions, while a spokesperson for the British government told Reuters it was “closely monitoring Australia’s approach to age restrictions”.
Inman Grant told the Guardian that from Thursday, she would be sending notices to the platforms covered by the ban to find out how the implementation was progressing.
Questions included “how many accounts [they’ve] deactivated or removed, what challenges they’re finding, how they’re preventing recidivism and preventing circumvention, whether or not their abuse or reporting abuse and the appeals processes are working as planned”, she said.
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Albanese said the information gathered in this process would be made public.
The regulator would need to assess whether platforms were taking reasonable steps. If they were not, it could take that platform to court to seek fines.
There would be an independent evaluation of the ban conducted by an academic advisory group examining the short-term, medium-term and longer-term impacts of the ban.
“It will look at the benefits over time, but also the unintended consequences,” Inman Grant said.
“Everything from are sleeping? Are they interacting or are they actually getting out on the sports fields? Are they reading books? Are they taking less medication like antidepressants? Are their Naplan scores improving over time?” Inman Grant said.
Potential unintended consequences to be investigated included whether children were moving on to “darker areas of the internet”, learning how to bypass the bans through VPNs, or moving on to other platforms, she said.
Teens on Snapchat affected by the ban had been publicly sharing their mobile numbers in their profiles ahead of their accounts being shut down.
A spokesperson for Snapchat said the platform understood under-16s were disappointed by the ban but “would strongly encourage any teens using Snapchat not to publicly share their personal contact information”.
Inman Grant said she had sent notices to 15 companies not initially included in the ban, asking them to self-assess whether they should be.
Yope and Lemon8, which shot up the app store rankings as teens looked for alternatives, were among those contacted.
