Australia Is Doubling Down on a Ban That Isn’t Working

Key Takeaways

• Australia has announced it will double the maximum penalty for platforms breaching its under-16 social media ban, raising the ceiling to $99 million AUD.
• The ban, which came into effect in December 2025, has been widely acknowledged as difficult to enforce, with seven out of ten affected children reportedly still accessing banned platforms.
• Rather than question whether the ban is working, the Australian government is responding by escalating pressure on tech companies with heavier fines and expanded regulatory powers.
• The UK has announced a similar ban for under-16s, set to come into effect by spring 2027, meaning this approach is spreading, not retreating.

Australia's social media ban for children under 16 has been in effect since December 2025, and by almost every measure, it isn't working. Seven out of ten children who had a social media account before the ban still have "some access," according to the eSafety Commission's own report. A BBC visit to a Sydney school in February found that the majority of students who used social media before the ban said they still had access to it. Investigations have been opened into the alleged non-compliance of five platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube.

The Australian government's response to all of this? Double the maximum fine for non-compliant platforms (from roughly $50 million to $99 million AUD) and hand the eSafety Commissioner new powers to compel platforms to hand over evidence of their compliance efforts. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese framed it as "doubling down on platforms that are not doing enough." Communications Minister Anika Wells said platforms were "doing the bare minimum" and accused them of using "tricks straight out of the big tech playbook."

I find myself genuinely frustrated by this framing; not because big tech companies deserve a defense, but because the government is diagnosing the problem incorrectly. The issue isn't that platforms aren't trying hard enough. The issue is that age-based bans aren’t technically enforceable in any meaningful way, and making them more expensive to violate doesn't change that underlying reality.

Bigger Fines Don’t Fix a Fundamentally Flawed Approach

A determined teenager will find a way around almost any platform-level restriction. VPNs, alternate accounts, borrowed logins, international app stores; the tools to circumvent these bans are freely available and widely understood by the exact demographic the law is trying to protect. The ban doesn't remove social media from a young person's world; it removes it from the list of things they can do without a workaround. That's not safety. That's friction.

More troubling to me is what enforcement actually requires. To meaningfully verify that a user is over 16, platforms need identity data, including real names, government documents, and biometric checks. That's the only mechanism that works with any reliability, and it's a mechanism that puts everyone's sensitive personal information into the hands of private companies at scale. Every person who wants to use a social media platform (adult or minor) gets swept into a surveillance system to satisfy a policy that demonstrably isn't achieving its stated goal.

Not to mention what happens when people know their identity is verified and on record – they change their behavior. They self-censor. They avoid communities and avoid sharing opinions that could follow them. The open, pseudonymous internet, flawed as it is, has always been a space where people can speak without fear of immediate real-world consequences. Age verification and the enforcement infrastructure it demands erode that. Not just for kids. For everyone.

The Rest of the World Is Watching

This matters beyond Australia. The UK has now announced a near-identical ban for under-16s, expected by spring 2027. Other countries are reportedly watching Australia's approach as a model. If that model is "the ban isn't working, so we escalate penalties and build more enforcement infrastructure," then what's being exported isn't child safety; it's a framework for greater government and corporate control over who can access the internet and on what terms.

I don't think anyone who supports these bans is acting in bad faith. The concern about children's well-being online is real, and it deserves serious engagement. But the solution being deployed here is too blunt, too broad, and too costly to everyone's privacy and freedom to justify. Throwing larger fines at platforms doesn't make the underlying policy sound. It just makes it more expensive to live with the consequences of a law that was always going to be this hard to enforce.