Australia’s Under-16 Social Media Ban: What It Means and Why Mobile Verification Matters

On 10 December 2025, Australia became the first country in the world to prohibit children under the age of 16 from holding social media accounts. The landmark policy, watched globally as a “real-life laboratory”, aims to understand and hopefully reduce the impact of social media on youth mental health.

Praised by many parents and criticised by some campaigners, the ban has raised hard questions about feasibility, enforcement and the tools platforms rely on to stay compliant, and the early evidence suggests those questions were well founded.

What the ban covers

Major platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Threads, X, YouTube, Reddit and the streaming services Kick and Twitch, all fall under the rules. Services such as YouTube Kids, Google Classroom and WhatsApp are not included, though the government has signalled it may expand the list, particularly to gaming platforms. The legislation behind the ban, the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act, passed in November 2024 and gave platforms roughly a year to prepare before the December 2025 commencement.

Who enforces the ban?

Responsibility sits with the platforms, not parents or children. Companies must take “reasonable steps” to prevent under-16s from creating or keeping an account, and could face penalties of up to A$49.5 million for serious or repeated failures.

Regulators expect companies to deploy age-assurance measures, but they have deliberately avoided specifying which technologies must be used. The result is a patchwork of solutions that vary by platform.

What the early months revealed

The first months of enforcement showed both the reach and the limits of the policy. By mid-December 2025, eSafety reported that age-restricted platforms had removed access to around 4.7 million under-16 accounts, with more than 200,000 TikTok accounts deactivated in Australia in the days around launch alone.

Those headline numbers come with important caveats. Researchers cautioned that the 4.7 million figure may be misleading, since many teenagers hold multiple accounts across platforms, and it remains unclear whether risky behaviour is genuinely reducing or simply migrating elsewhere. Polling by the Molly Rose Foundation found that 61% of Australian 12 to 15-year-olds who held accounts before the ban still had access to at least one afterwards. There were also widely reported cases of children circumventing age-estimation checks with simple tricks, including drawing on facial hair to fool the technology.

A challenge of loopholes and limitations

Traditional age checks, such as document uploads and facial recognition, introduce friction and raise privacy concerns. Even more problematic is their vulnerability to manipulation, as the early circumvention reports demonstrated.

Additional loopholes remain open. VPNs can obscure location, gaming apps often include messaging or social elements, and many online communities sit outside the platforms covered by the ban. Commentators have pointed in particular to platforms such as Roblox, Discord and Steam, where young people routinely interact with strangers but which fall outside the ban’s current scope.

Concerns have also been raised about false positives that may inadvertently block legitimate users, and false negatives that fail to catch underage sign-ups. With high penalties attached, the risk for platforms is significant.

Why mobile verification offers a stronger approach

One solution stands out for being both robust and familiar: mobile-network-based verification.

Almost every young person has a mobile number, making it a universal identifier that avoids intrusive ID uploads. Our mobile identity checks use real-time network data to confirm whether a mobile number belongs to an adult account holder, creating a more reliable age signal than document scans or biometric tools, and one that is far harder to defeat with a drawn-on beard or a substituted photo.

Key advantages

• Fewer drop-offs: no need for users to find documents, take photos or upload sensitive information, allowing verification for ‘thin-file’ customers.
• Reduced fraud risk: network-verified data is far harder to spoof than images or scans.
• Privacy-friendly: no storage of biometric data or identity documents.
• Consistent across platforms: mobile verification creates a unified method for meeting regulatory expectations without forcing companies to build bespoke age-assurance flows.

What happens next?

Enforcement is now an ongoing obligation rather than a one-off switch. Platforms must continue to identify and deactivate under-16 accounts and report their progress to regulators, and eSafety amended the Rules in March 2026 to sharpen how the obligation is targeted. A Stanford-led academic advisory group has been appointed to assess the policy’s longer-term impact on young people’s wellbeing.

The early picture has not gone unnoticed elsewhere. Governments across the UK, Europe and beyond are watching Australia closely as they weigh similar measures, while critics continue to warn that the ban may isolate some teenagers who rely on online communities for support, and risks pushing others towards less regulated spaces.

What the Australian experience has made clear is that a legal age threshold is only as strong as the verification behind it. As regulations tighten and expectations rise, mobile-network-based verification provides an accurate, low-friction and privacy-conscious method for platforms seeking to comply without compromising the experience of legitimate users.