Australia is going where no country has gone before, and many countries around the world are watching. On Wednesday, Australia will institute a social media ban for anyone under the age of 16.
Banned apps include TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, Snapchat, YouTube, Reddit, Kick and Twitch. Exempt apps include the popular gaming platform Discord, Messenger Kids, WhatsApp, Pinterest, Kids Helpline, Google Classroom and YouTube Kids. AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, OpenAI’s Sora and Google Gemini aren’t included in the ban.
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Australia will be the first country to launch this kind of age-restricted social media ban. Several other countries, including China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, Turkey, Uganda, Saudi Arabia and India have full or partial social media bans, typically for political and security reasons.
Other countries, including Denmark, France, Norway and Malaysia, are considering similar bans to Australia’s and will be monitoring the effectiveness of the Australian ban over the coming months.
Although many studies have been conducted worldwide about the psycho-emotional effects of social media usage on children, the idea for the Australian ban took its spark from The Anxious Generation, a book by US psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Annabel West, the wife of South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas, encouraged her husband to consider a ban after reading Haidt’s book in 2024.
Tech companies must enforce it, or else
Apps can utilize age-assurance technology, such as facial and voice analysis, to verify that a consumer is at least 16 years of age. Social media companies can also check how long an account has been active and assess age by language style and community memberships.
Kids being kids, they will find workarounds — such as one 13-year-old who held up a photo of her mother’s face to fool the age verification. The Australian government said it will prevent kids from using false identity documents, AI tools or VPNs to fake their age and location.
Tech companies will face a $33 million fine, as outlined in the legislation, if they fail to enforce the under-16 ban.
Two 15-year-old Australians, supported by the Digital Freedom Project, are challenging the social media ban, and the country’s High Court could hear their case as early as February. They argue, in part, that the ban “will have the effect of sacrificing a considerable sphere of freedom of expression and engagement for 13-to-15-year-olds in social media interactions (including communications on personal and governmental matters, and the benefits to those young people of such interactions).”
TikTok said it will comply with the new laws, although noting that the restrictions “may be upsetting” to customers. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has already begun removing accounts of users under 16. Snapchat is ready to boot nearly half a million Australian kids from their accounts. Not surprisingly, X boss Elon Musk has criticized the change, writing in 2024 that the law “seems like a backdoor way to control access to the Internet by all Australians.”
Some praise the ban
Donna Rice Hughes, president and CEO of Enough is Enough, a nonprofit with a mission to “make the Internet safer for children and families,” praised Australia for “taking a proactive stick approach to protect children from social media harms.”
Enough is Enough, which launched in 1992, has documented the myriad pitfalls of social media for children, including overuse, sexting, online exploitation, bullying, depression and more. The organization has published several internet safety guides and safety settings for social media apps.
“This ban should be an incentive for social media and other online platforms and services to be proactive in implementing safer-by-design technologies and default parental management tools before rushing to market with products that are potentially dangerous for children and teens,” Hughes told CNET.
Hughes added that Big Tech has only itself to blame for governmental intervention such as Australia’s.
“They’ve failed to do the right thing by our children from the start,” she said. “The carrot approach of voluntary industry efforts to prioritize child safety over profits hasn’t worked. A historic reality is that the first social media platforms to take off in the US and abroad, Facebook and Myspace, were developed for college-age students and older.”
The US does not have a sweeping age limit like Australia’s, but 12 states are working on laws to regulate and restrict teens’ access to social media.