The Anti-Social Media Law That's Actually Working

Australia banned under-16s from social media in 2025. Here is what the data shows one year later, what other countries are planning, and whether this approach can actually work.

Australia's Social Media Minimum Age Act — which prohibits social media platforms from allowing users under 16 to create accounts, with financial penalties for non-compliant platforms of up to AUD 50 million per breach — came into force in January 2026 following its November 2025 passage through Parliament. One year of implementation data is beginning to appear, and the picture is more complex than either the law's enthusiastic supporters or its civil liberties critics predicted.

Platform compliance has been partial: Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Snapchat have implemented age verification systems that require new account creators to provide government-issued identification. The specific systems vary: Instagram is using facial age estimation technology that compares uploaded photos against databases to estimate age; TikTok has implemented government ID verification. Existing accounts of underage users who created accounts before the law's enactment are more difficult to address, and enforcement of age verification for existing accounts is lagging behind new account requirements.

The early social indicators: emergency room presentations for adolescent self-harm in Australian states are showing modest downward trends compared to 2024 figures, but attributing this to the social media law rather than to other factors (mental health service investment, economic conditions, other policy changes) is methodologically difficult in the absence of a control group that hasn't experienced the law.

The civil liberties dimension: age verification requirements that require government ID submission to access social media platforms raise specific concerns about privacy (government-correlated database of platform access), access (young people without government ID being excluded), and the precedent of government ID requirements for internet access. The law's framing as child protection makes these objections politically difficult to articulate without appearing to prioritise abstract rights over concrete child welfare.

Countries watching Australia's experiment include the UK (whose Online Safety Act includes age verification requirements for adult content), France (whose proposed social media age limits are advancing through Parliament), and Canada (where similar legislation is in development). Whether the Australian approach becomes a global template depends substantially on whether the implementation produces the mental health outcomes that motivated it.