Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images
In 2024, Australia passed a new law called the Online Safety Amendment. Its primary purpose was simple: to introduce “an obligation on certain social media platforms to take reasonable steps to prevent children under 16 years of age from having an account.” By then, worries about young people, social media, and screen time had gone mainstream, and legislative proposals were popping up around the world, mostly in the form of school phone bans and age-verification laws. Australia, though, just went ahead and did the thing — a national ban, in a large liberal democracy, on teens using social media.
The rules went into effect in December 2025 and covered “Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, Twitch, X, YouTube, Kick and Reddit … among others,” a list which “may change in the future.” Lawmakers and activists in other countries were watching closely; the severity and simplicity of the ban could help clarify a set of issues about which the limited available data tells a stubbornly unsatisfying story. An article published in Nature suggested that the move was an enormous and unprecedented “natural experiment.” Six months in, a group of Australian researchers have published their findings in The BMJ. Their takeaway? The ban, in practice, wasn’t much of a ban at all:
The findings suggest that the period immediately after introduction of the Act was characterised by limited implementation, incomplete compliance, and substantial circumvention of social media restrictions. In this context, overall, we found insufficient evidence to conclude that exposure to the Act had any early substantial effects on social media use among adolescents aged under 16 years.
A large majority of teens in the study reported that they were able to keep using the platforms uninterrupted with a thinner majority describing encountering any sort of age verification at all. When they did, they were often able to self-declare their ages or pass through facial-recognition tests undetected; many were able to create fake accounts, while a small number resorted using VPNs to shield their locations.
This wasn’t entirely surprising — the Australian government’s eSafety Commissioner had found earlier that a “substantial” portion of teenagers still had access to their social-media accounts or had created new ones, citing “poor practices” by platforms, and the consensus among actual Australian teens and their parents is that the system wasn’t quite working as expected. (Samples from a lively discussion on Reddit, which is challenging the law in Australian court, in June: “My 14yo son bypassed the youtube age check by holding a black and white pic of thomas edison… up to his laptop webcam.” “My kids bypassed it with ease.” “It’s made it harder for adults more than the kids. Kids find work arounds very quickly whilst us oldies now have to jump through hoops and give away privacy.”)
The Australian government has responded by saying it plans to shore up enforcement of the law and fortify it against numerous legal threats. (And while the researchers behind the recent study found minimal short-term effects on overall usage by teens who already use social media, they suggested that the law could be more effective in preventing younger teens, not yet habituated, from logging on.) So far, though, the measure, which has inspired similar plans in the U.K. and elsewhere, has been useful in clarifying the trade-offs here. The ad-hoc compliance system produced in response — a patchwork of age-verification and attestation tools, mostly — wasn’t enough to stop teens from getting through, but it has resulted in noticeable costs for everyone else in the form of routine inconvenience and loss of privacy. Some platforms are using outside vendors to handle age-gating, which results in not just teens but a much wider group of adults being asked to upload photos or link their profiles to bank accounts.
There are obvious ways to improve enforceability and plenty of precedent for doing so. For example, while some young people can find their way through identity-verification tools on gambling platforms, it’s fairly rare and usually requires a co-conspirator. The flip side, of course, is that to bet on sports in places like New York, you have to submit your full legal name, address, and Social Security number — and if that doesn’t take, a government ID and video proof that it’s yours. This might feel like an acceptable trade-off to an adult with a hunch about the NBA Finals. But people might feel differently about going through a similar process to log on to Instagram. You really can gate off the internet, in other words. You just might end up changing it a lot in the process.
