Half of the children covered by Australia’s social media ban say the platforms they use haven’t even asked them to verify their age. That one figure tells you most of what you need to know about how the first three months have gone.
Australia’s eSafety Commissioner has released its first official data on the ban, which came into effect in December 2025 and prohibits children under 16 from holding accounts on major social media platforms. The figures come from a two-year study tracking more than 4,100 children and families, with this initial snapshot taken in March, three months after the law kicked in.
The headline number looks promising on the surface. The share of under-16s holding accounts on age-restricted platforms dropped from 52.4 percent to 42.1 percent. But dig one level deeper and the picture changes fast. The percentage of children who actually accessed a restricted platform in the previous month only fell from 85.9 percent to 81.5 percent. A four-point drop after a nationally enforced legal ban is not a success story.
The platforms currently covered by the law include Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, X, Reddit, Twitch, Threads, and Kick. Most of them don’t require an account to view content, which means a child watching YouTube or a Twitch stream still counts as accessing a restricted service. In March, 73.6 percent of children aged 10 to 15 said they had used YouTube in the previous four weeks. At least a quarter reported using TikTok, Snapchat, or Instagram.
And when kids can’t get onto a restricted platform, they’re not logging off. They’re just going somewhere else. Pinterest use among under-16s jumped from 16.6 to 21.8 percent. BeReal climbed from 0.2 to 2.2 percent. Even Mastodon went from zero reported use to 0.7 percent. That migration to unregulated platforms is exactly the kind of privacy risk that tends to get ignored in these policy conversations. Smaller, less-scrutinized services often have weaker data practices and fewer content moderation resources than the big platforms the law was designed to restrict.
The enforcement gap is obvious. Just over 37 percent of children said the age listed on their account was above 16. Around 11 percent said their parents helped them bypass restrictions. And 7.4 percent used a VPN. These aren’t sophisticated workarounds. They’re basic, and the platforms are making no serious effort to stop them. The eSafety Commissioner herself acknowledged that the data “strongly suggest providers were not effectively preventing under-16s from having accounts” in the first three months. Australia has since announced larger fines for non-compliant platforms, but financial penalties tend to be slow medicine.
There were some softer findings in the report. Children who said they felt like they were missing out by not having social media dropped from 43.3 to 36.3 percent. Some kids reported feeling safer online or having better relationships. But the report also found that parental awareness of how children use social media actually declined, particularly among parents of girls and younger children aged 10 to 12. So in one of the places where oversight should be tightening, it’s getting looser.
Countries including the UK and several US states are watching Australia’s experiment closely, with similar restrictions either in place or moving through legislation. But if the lesson from the first three months is anything, it’s that banning accounts without requiring real age verification from platforms is mostly theater. Kids don’t need a VPN to get around a system that isn’t checking in the first place.