It’s been 100 days since the Under 16 social media ban began and all signs are indicating it has been a massive failure with teens easily able to dodge the age verification while vulnerable youth have been diverted to less regulated platforms.
The ban came into effect on December 10, 2025, with social media platforms asked to use reasonable measures to remove accounts for any users under 16.
Part of the process was age verification technology which would scan faces to determine the age of the user.
The Australian Government spent $6.5m on the Age Assurance Technology Trial but reports suggest there are still around 70 per cent of Australians aged between 10 and 16 that are still on social media platforms.
Snapchat reported it had closed down more than 415,000 accounts with its own age detection technology but parents, teens and experts are all saying it is easily and routinely bypassed.
Teens interviewed recently on A Current Affair said the ban has had little effect on their access to social media accounts.
A poll on X showed 45 per cent of respondents said their child had found a workaround to the ban with a further 34 per cent saying the ban has had no impact at all.
In this sample, eight out of 10 parents says there is no effective enforcement of the social media ban.
Teens have even turned to AI chatbots for advice on how to circumvent the ban.
Meta – the platform that owns Instagram and Facebook – also shared its feed back after 100 days of Australia’s social media ban.
“Australia had the opportunity to set a single, accurate standard for age assurance across the whole app ecosystem,” Meta said in a statement.
“Instead, the Government chose a patchwork approach that’s inconsistent across services and risks pushing young people towards less regulated, less safe corners of the internet.
“If the goal is genuinely safer, age‑appropriate experiences, we believe the best option is to raise the bar across the entire ecosystem and give parents a simple, consistent point of control.
“App‑store level age assurance is the practical path that Australia missed.”
Digital wellbeing expert researcher Dr Jo Orlando says the social media ban has been a failure. In a recent social media post she gave it a score of three out of 10.
“They didn’t expect young people to have multiple social media accounts so one account closes four others are still running,” she said in her TikTok post.
“They also didn’t expect such varied use of social media by this age group so there were a lot of errors in which accounts were banned and which ones were banned.
“And also those face scans just get your older cousin to do it, they seemed so easy to bypass.
Dr Orlando said the Australian Government had the best intentions but the execution has been ineffective.
“It started an international movement around social media safety and that’s a great thing but the execution of the ban is just not working,” she said.
“It feels like they built a fence around Australia and left the gate open and the kids found the gate in a couple of minutes.”
But the adverse effect of the social media ban is the displacement of users under 16 to other less regulated platforms that lack the safety features of mainstream platforms.
On the day the social media ban began, platforms not included by the government like Lemon8 (which is owned by TikTok) and Yope made it into the top 10 downloads in the app stores.
Many migrated to Roblox which was once described by the eSafety Commissioner as “a popular target for paedophiles seeking to groom children”.
One massive hole in the ban is online gaming communities. It is here where the eSafety’s own research discovered one in four children are cyberbullied on these online gaming platforms. That figure rises to 37 per cent among boys.
And on the mental health front, research by ReachOut found that 73 per cent of young people access support through social media.
Banning social media for young Australians under 16 has now removed that support for our most vulnerable youth.
