It took Cruz Condren about a week to lose his Snapchat account, and a few seconds to get it back.
“It asked me to verify my age by a camera,” says the 14-year-old from the Gold Coast. “I just asked my mum to scan her face because she’s over 18. It just let me back on.”
Six months after Australia became the first country to ban under 16s from social media, Cruz’s workaround – performed with his mother’s blessing – is the kind of evidence now being weighed in London, Brussels and Ottawa as governments decide whether to copy Australia’s experiment or learn from its mistakes.
Communications Minister Anika Wells spent Thursday morning dialling in to a London broadcast studio via Zoom to make the case for the former.
“A lot of people who are against a ban here are using what they describe as the evidence from Australia to say, look, this doesn’t work,” Sky News host Sophy Ridge put to her. “Loads of kids are getting around it, so what’s the point?”
Wells’ answer was that the sceptics “and their allies in big tech” want doubt cast over Australia’s experiment precisely so that nobody else tries it. “We’re not backing down, we’re going further,” she said, flagging a digital duty of care bill for federal parliament later this year.
The world is watching, and splitting. More than a dozen countries have announced plans to follow suit, by Wells’ count. Canada this week introduced its own bill, while the European Commission has flagged a legislative proposal as soon as this northern summer, with President Ursula von der Leyen pointedly adopting Canberra’s preferred language of a social media “delay” rather than a ban. Greece is restricting under 15s. A New Zealand bill modelled on the Australian law is before parliament.
Others are learning from what they perceive as Australia’s missteps. Britain has spent months weighing a blanket ban against targeted restrictions on the features that make platforms addictive – such as infinite scroll – promising to “look at expert and international evidence to get this right”, and the evidence its sceptics are studying hardest is Australia’s circumvention problem.
Washington has gone further still: the Trump administration now treats foreign regulation of American tech companies as an unfair trade barrier. Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, was summoned before US Congress in November by Republican Jim Jordan, who called her a “zealot” whose law “threatens speech of American citizens”. She refused to appear.
The awkward truth for Wells, though, is that the doubt is not coming only from big tech and its allies. It is coming from the regulator enforcing her law.
Fencing the ocean, policing the sharks
“I don’t know if you know this, but I was not really keen on it when it was first discussed,” Inman Grant told this masthead over lunch last month. The law was “a very blunt force approach”, she said, built on legislation drafted “very quickly”. “It was very thin scaffolding. I don’t have potent powers.”
Her favourite analogy? The ocean. “What you’re effectively asking us to do with this is fence the ocean,” she has said repeatedly. “We might be able to create some friction and some degree of safety, but it’s a futile exercise if you think you’re totally stemming the ocean.”
Wells has adopted the same metaphor. “You can’t fence the ocean, we can’t control the internet … But you can police the sharks,” she told the BBC last Thursday. The ban, she said, exists to give children “36 more months to learn who they are before the platforms try to tell them who they are”.
To critics, the legislation was politics at its most cynical. It went from introduction to passage through federal parliament in barely a week, and the public was given 24 hours to make submissions to the Senate inquiry examining it. Australia now finds itself in a strange position for a country that promised to show the world how to protect children online: the official policing the ban, who prefers to call it “the delay”, has openly questioned whether a ban was ever the right tool.
So, should the world follow? That depends on whether it’s working, and almost nobody agrees on what “working” means.
The gap behind the numbers
More than 5 million accounts have been deactivated, a figure Wells contextualises herself: Australia has only 1.2 million people aged 13 to 16.
“It speaks to the fact that lots of young people have multiple accounts and lots of young people are trying to find their way around the ban, which we expected,” she said.
Meanwhile, eSafety has reported a 37 per cent drop in under 16s holding accounts over three months, a result Inman Grant defends in public health terms: “If you think about any other public health movement over a three-month period, that’s a very impressive reduction.”
But deactivated accounts are not the same as children gone – eSafety’s March compliance report found about 70 per cent of children who held accounts on Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube before the ban were still using them; Inman Grant concedes many “were never even asked to age verify”.
Research released last week by data firm Pureprofile, surveying 1025 parents, teachers and young Australians, found 78 per cent of under 16s still accessed banned platforms, barely down from 84 per cent before the ban. Only 31 per cent of children reported ever having their face scanned, and about half of those passed as over 16. Two in five admitted having tried to get around the restrictions.
The displaced did not simply log off. Downloads of fringe apps such as Yope and Lemon8 briefly surged by as much as 251 per cent, while services outside the ban, including Discord, Roblox and Steam, have become the new teen gathering places. The March report found no notable change in cyberbullying or image-based abuse complaints involving age-restricted accounts compared with a year earlier.
Platforms included in Australia’s social media ban
- BlueSky
- ByteDance: Lemon 8, TikTok
- Meta: Facebook, Instagram, Threads
- Google: YouTube
- Kick
- Snapchat
- Twitch
- Wizz
- X
And yet, the policy keeps getting more popular. Pureprofile found 76 per cent of Australians backed the ban, up from 73 per cent before it began, and 77 per cent of parents now reported positive impacts – children reading more, playing more sport, spending more time outdoors – up from 47 per cent a year ago.
‘I don’t know one kid that’s not on it’
Cruz’s mother, Chantal Condren, helped her son back onto Snapchat, and makes no apology. The family moved to the Gold Coast a year ago, and “without that social media, Cruz would not have made the friendships he has”. When the ban first hit, Sydney mothers started texting her for Cruz’s number “because the kids didn’t even have phone numbers saved in their phones. They all just contact everybody through social media accounts”.
She is not a hands-off parent. Cruz’s phone runs under her Apple ID, he needs her face or password to change anything, and she scrolls his messages a few times a week. “My whole algorithm is just dirt bikes and fishing and surfing,” she says. But she thinks the ban misunderstands how teenagers live.
“I don’t know one kid that’s not on it. Taking it away from your child doesn’t mean they’re not going to be exposed to anything because every other kid’s got a phone. That kid that’s deprived is just going to go hunting it more and more.”
Cruz agrees the fence barely slowed his cohort. “Everyone’s pretty much still on there because it’s just so easy to get back on,” he says.
Lara Leung is the teenager the policy was made for. Kicked off about half her apps, including Snapchat, the 15-year-old from Melbourne never tried to get back on.
“I was actually kind of excited about the social media ban,” she says. “I was happy to get an excuse to get off social media because sometimes I can’t control when I mindlessly press on the app.” She has since put screen-time limits on the platforms that never removed her, and her usage is falling.
Her verdict on the law is more measured than the minister’s and more generous than the commissioner’s. “It was well-intentioned, and if executed in a better way it would have definitely made a good impact,” she says. “But most people just found a way to get around the rule.” She still supports it for younger children: “Having that barrier between the younger kids and social media is helpful.”
No fines, and a $650,000 warning shot
No platform has been fined since the ban went into place, despite penalties of up to $49.5 million per breach, however, eSafety is investigating Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube for practices including letting children who had declared themselves under 16 keep retrying the same age check until they passed, and has retained an external legal team.
“Unfortunately, we don’t have a fine-issuing button,” Inman Grant told Senate estimates in May. “Systemic non-compliance needs to be proven in court with solid evidence and complex legal proceedings.”
Her office knows how long that road is. A three-year action against Elon Musk’s X over a child safety transparency notice concluded last month, with the company admitting liability and paying $650,000 plus $100,000 in legal costs — peanuts against the platform’s reported $47 billion valuation.
“Any fine at all would be something [age-restricted platforms] would spend billions in legal costs and lobbying to avoid, including just $1,” says Dr Timothy Koskie, of the University of Sydney’s Centre for AI Trust and Governance. “That is because our law sets a precedent.”
Every platform is weighing the cost of compliance against the value of a local market worth, by The Global Media & Internet Concentration Project’s Cameron McTernan’s estimate, up to $3.2 billion a year in revenue to Meta, TikTok, YouTube and Reddit alone.
Dan Svantesson, co-director of Bond University’s Centre for Space, Cyberspace and Data Law, says the regulator’s ultimate weapon is drastic: “The eSafety commissioner can go to court and get orders requiring, in a sense, the stopping of operation in Australia of these services, if it comes to that. But that’s obviously on the extreme end of the spectrum.” The calculus shifts, says Svantesson, as more countries sign up. That’s when it makes more business sense to comply.
That, Inman Grant argues, is the real game. The platforms are “10 of the largest and most powerful companies in the world being brought into a social experiment they don’t want to be part of, or do well, because then this will become the norm for them”, she said in February. “But I do think they’re at the tipping point now that the rest of the world is looking at this and is getting on board.”
There are early signs: Apple announced a major uplift to parental controls this week, and Wells says chief executive Tim Cook called Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to say it was inspired by Australia’s laws.
The verdict
The ban has not failed outright, and on some readings, it is quietly succeeding. “You have a policy that does not appear to have hampered the bulk of Australians, that has cost us quite little, and managed to make hundreds of thousands of Australians’ lives better,” Koskie says. “That’s staggering.”
But as other countries move, the verdict will not be Australia’s alone to deliver. Two ongoing High Court challenges, from Reddit and the Digital Freedom Project, are testing the law’s constitutional foundations, any enforcement action must survive the Federal Court, and a statutory review is under way.
Wells says her eyes are on the horizon: “In three years’ time there’s going to be a generation of Australians who will never have a social media account until they turn 16.”
Inman Grant will watch from the sidelines. She stands down when her term ends on January 17, after a decade as the world’s first online safety regulator and a year as the enforcer of its most contested experiment.
Asked how she was feeling, her answer ran to two words. “I’m exhausted.”
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David Swan is the technology editor for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He was previously technology editor for The Australian newspaper.Connect via X or email.
Bronte Gossling is a reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, WAtoday and Brisbane Times.Connect via email.