Teens are banned from social apps in Australia. Global policy test begins

Australia on Wednesday became the first country to officially ban users under 16 from accessing major social media platforms, a move expected to be closely watched by global technology companies and policymakers around the world.

Canberra’s ban comes into effect from midnight local time and covers 10 major services, including: alphabet‘s YouTube, Meta”Instagram, ByteDance’s TikTok, reddit, snapchat And Elon Musk’s X.

The controversial rules require these platforms to take “reasonable steps” to prevent access by minors, using age verification methods such as inferences from online activity, face estimation from selfies, uploaded IDs and linked bank details.

All covered platforms agreed to adhere to this policy to some degree. Elon Musk’s X Company, one of the last holdouts, signaled it would comply on Wednesday.

The policy is expected to result in millions of Australian children losing access to their social accounts.

However, the policy’s impact could be far-reaching, as it will serve as a benchmark for other governments considering social media bans for teenagers, including Denmark, Norway, France, Spain, Malaysia and New Zealand.

Prior to the bill’s passage last year, a YouGov poll found 77% of Australians supported a social media ban for under-16s. Still, this development has faced some resistance since the law was enacted.

Supporters of the bill say it protects children from harms related to social media, including cyberbullying, mental health issues, exposure to predators and pornography.

Among those who welcomed Wednesday’s official ban was Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist and author of the best-selling 2024 book Anxious Generation, which links smartphone and social media use, especially among young people, to a growing mental health crisis.

In a post on social media platform

“There will certainly be challenges in the first few months, but the world is rooting for your success and many other countries will follow suit,” he added.

Opponents, meanwhile, argue that the ban violates freedom of expression and access to information, raises privacy concerns through invasive age verification, and amounts to excessive government intervention that undermines parental responsibility.

Those critics include groups like Amnesty Tech, which said in a statement Tuesday that the ban is an ineffective amendment that ignores the rights and realities of young people.

Damini Satija, Amnesty Tech Program Director, said: “The most effective way to protect children and young people online is to protect all social media users through better regulation, stronger data protection laws and better platform design.”

Meanwhile, David Inserra, a freedom of expression and technology fellow at the Cato Institute, warned in a blog post that children will circumvent the new policies by moving to new platforms, private apps like Telegram, and VPNs, pushing them into “more isolated communities and less protective platforms” that are harder to monitor.

Tech companies such as Google have also warned that the policy could be extremely difficult to enforce, while government-commissioned reports have pointed to inaccuracies in age verification technologies such as selfie-based age estimation software.

In fact, local reports in Australia on Wednesday showed that age guarantee tools misclassified users and that many children have already circumvented the ban, with workarounds such as VPNs proving effective.

But Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese acknowledged in an opinion piece on Sunday that the system won’t work perfectly from the beginning, likening it to liquor laws and trying to pre-empt these problems.

“The fact that teenagers sometimes find ways to drink does not diminish the value of having clear national standards,” he added.

Experts told CNBC they expect continued challenges in the rollout and that regulators will need to take a trial-and-error approach.

Terry Flew, professor of digital communications and culture at the University of Sydney, said: “There’s a huge amount of teething issues around this issue. Many young people are posting on TikTok that they’ve successfully circumvented age restrictions, and that’s not surprising.”

“There can never be 100% disappearance of all people under 16 from all designated platforms on day one,” he added.

Experts told CNBC that policy developments in Australia will be closely watched by tech companies and lawmakers around the world, as other countries consider their own moves to ban or restrict social media use by teenagers.

“Governments are responding to changing public expectations about the internet and social media, but businesses are not particularly responsive to moral persuasion,” Frew said.

He added: “Similar pressures are occurring particularly, but not exclusively, in Europe.”

In November, the European Parliament passed a non-binding resolution advocating that access to social media be restricted to those aged 16 and older, with parental consent required for those aged 13 to 15.

The coalition also proposes banning addictive features such as infinite scrolling and autoplay for minors, which could lead to an EU-wide crackdown on non-compliant platforms.

Outside Europe, Malaysia and New Zealand are also moving ahead with proposals to ban social media for children under 16.

However, we expect that laws in other regions will differ from Australian laws regarding age restrictions and age verification processes.

“We hope that countries considering introducing similar policies will monitor what hasn’t worked in Australia and learn from our mistakes,” said Tama Lieber, professor of internet at Curtin University and principal investigator at the ARC Center of Excellence for the Digital Child.

“I think platforms and technology companies are also starting to realize that if they don’t want to implement age-restricted policies everywhere, they need to do more work on providing safer and more relevant experiences for younger users.”