Chris Marsden with an acerbic look at the origins and, perhaps unintended, consequences of Australia’s social media ban for under 16’s which comes into force today.
I write this on the eve of Australia’s under-16 social media ban, which stops all Australians using social media unless they can prove they are over 16. Unsurprisingly, it will affect over 60s much more than the supposedly ‘Anxious Generation’ under-16s, as the former are more ignorant of the Act’s effect and their need to prove their age. Chaos will have broken out for Christmas by the time you read this post (note: Betoota is a fictional ‘Australia’s best news source’), and ‘crazy uncle’ may be unable to spoil everyone’s festivities in the family group chat. Australia is already winding down for the long Christmas and New Year beach holidays and Ashes victories, with 15,16 and 18 year olds finishing exams in November, andParliament out of session from 27 November, until the first Tuesday of February 2026. This ban is taking place in the ‘silly season’. Remember that Australia was a very latecomer to digital social media for the majority of the population, with late 3G mobile smartphone adoption and very late broadband home Internet provision, itself only achieved as a result of a government-owned infrastructure provider, the National Broadband Network (NBN), that only really rolled out broadband from 2016.
Prime Minister Albanese wrote in a News Corporation (Murdoch family-owned) newspaper:
“children under the age of 16 will be banned from having social media accounts. This will be one of the biggest social and cultural changes our nation has faced. It is profound reform which will be a source of national pride in years to come This is a world-leading move by Australia and it is a change driven, overwhelmingly, by Australian parents.”1
The specific parent is nonagenarian Rupert Murdoch approaching his 95th birthday.
Social media age restrictions for Australians under 16 are due to take effect 10 December, which is the last date they can be effected under the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024. The law requires age-restricted social media platforms to take ‘reasonable steps’ to prevent children under 16 from having an account on their platform. There is no penalty for children who breach the ban, or their parents/guardians. This law was passed in a hurry in the ‘wash up’ final week of the 2024-25 47th Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia – though it turned out that the election was not held until 3rd May 2025, so the ‘rush to legislation, repent at leisure’ argued by the Law Council of Australia, was unnecessary.
The dates are important. The Bill itself was a pre-election concession to News Corporation and other commercial media support for the ban, which was portrayed as family-friendly but of course hits their main digital platform competitors hard. It follows up Australia’s “world leading” digital news bargaining code, direct subsidies paid by the largest digital platforms to their older commercial rivals, a measure introduced in aCOVID era hurry before the 2022 election but reinforced by the Albanese government before the 2025 election. There is a pattern here.
The date is also important for implementation of the ban. Every social media user on the largest platforms has to prove they are over 16 if they are identified as Australian. For some with accounts that have existed since the 2000s, that will be an automatic process and trivial. For others with a Virtual Private Network (VPN), they can set their location outside Australia and avoid the ban whatever their age. Anecdotally, this has caused a spike in VPN adverts on social media, with YouTube shows such as ‘The Grade Cricketer’ (an Aussie Ashes autopsy podcast with over 100 million views) sponsored by VPN brands. Declared date of birth will help no one as many under-16s lied about their age when first signing up to social media.
Many users will be required to upload official photo ID or go through a facial verification process. The latter can identify under-16s as much older so is of limited effect. Will it be thought reasonable by the regulator? Both forms of age identification are very serious privacy invasions, with Australia not yet having a functional privacy regulator or effective cybersecurity laws. This may be the latest test of the effective powers of the new Privacy Commissioner, appointed in 2024 to enforce the 2024 amendments to the Privacy Act 1988, and the privacy enforcement powers in Section 63F of the 2024 Online Safety (Amendment) Act.
The Prime Minister and his new Communications Minister, Anika Wells, celebrated in Hugh Jackman’s New York pub to celebrate the introduction of the ban and their presentation of its effect at the United Nations on 26 September 2025. Unfortunately for the Minister, the $100,000 cost of flights to New York caused such a scandal that she today referred herself to the Independent Parliamentary Expenses Authority. This followed confected outrage from those same newspapers that had backed the social media teen ban but attacked her Labour Party remorselessly through its triumphant 2025 election campaign, and now is attacking the ban, together with the Coalition opposition that had vehemently supported it last year. Biting the hand that feeds.
The details of the plan are straightforward and the enabling Act is very short. Obligations are placed on digital social media platforms as declared by the E-Safety Commissioner, which ran an extensive consultation in June-August 2025 to identify which apps should face the ban and how the ban should be enforced by those platforms. The social media platforms affected are: Facebook Instagram and Threads (all Meta), TikTok, Snapchat, X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, Reddit, Twitch, Kick. It does not yet affect Roblox but it is taking measures to ringfence various age groups: under nine, nine-12, 13-15, 16-17, 18-20, and 21+. App stores in Australia have reported a huge increase in app downloads from those social media not on the list, including TikTok associated app Lemon8 (note federal government employees have been banned from installing TikTok on their phones since 2022). These are presumed to have been driven by demand from under-16s and older teens worried about the effectiveness of the ban. Under-16s are overwhelmingly negative towards the ban itself.
What will be the immediate legal effects? First, it will impact e-commerce businesses as there will be business outages on the first days after the ban. Facebook Marketplace and other sites caught in the ban will inevitably make mistakes in removing business accounts, no matter how effective they may claim their AI and other verification processes to be. Hopefully that will resolve itself before the Christmas shopping rush finishes, only 14 days after the ban. Second, there will be cybersecurity as well as privacy incidents. Snap for instance uses a Singapore based facial recognition provider, k-ID. Other providers will also collect and ideally delete IDs and other sensitive documents. Third, there will be cases of consumers complaining about VPN provision, using the ineffective Australian Consumer Law that the Government recently refused to update for AI-generated threats, as VPNs of various quality and provenance become one of the unexpectedly popular Christmas presents this year. Fourth, there will inevitably be tragic cases of under- 16s becoming isolated and self- harming either with or without using social media, as they are removed from online support (or harm) networks. It will be difficult to maintain an objective evidence base as newspapers and commercial media will have a feeding frenzy on maladministration of the ban. Fifth, there will be over-16s and even over-60s who fail to prove their age and are digitally excluded for the holidays. That can create very real- life ill effects in a society as radically online as Australia has become after the long COVID lockdowns of 2020-21. There will be a sixth, seventh and eighth that are unknown unknowns, and in which Australia will almost immediately become ‘world leading’.
What will be the medium term domestic legal effects? Reddit may appeal to the High Court against its place on the list which it claims is “legally erroneous”, as may Google for YouTube. Some children have been sponsored by the libertarian Digital Freedom Project to bring a test case rapidly to the High Court in February. Western Australia intervened in the High Court challenge, joining New South Wales and South Australia defending the legislation. Australia is the last developed nation to have no embedded human rights law, so such challenges may fall short under the 1901 Federal Constitution. They may have a better chance under administrative law, but as the system was completely amended in 2023, that is another unknown unknown. There is a more systemic medium- term effect. Australia’s government in 2024 ducked the official recommendation that it revise the Online Safety Act 2021 by introducing a Digital Duty of Care (DDoC). It refused to publish the report for several months, instead introducing this tabloid-championed censorship as virtually emergency legislation given the abbreviated timetable. The E-Safety and Privacy Commissioners cautioned against this law passing in November 2024: they knew it would be a disaster compared to the evidence based DDoC that is needed. They are now implementing what every technology law expert knows is a bad policy. But the DDoC Recommendation remains whilethe UK regulator Ofcom is implementing such a scheme extremely slowly under its genuinely interesting Online Safety Act 2023. The European Digital Services Act Article 32 introduces such a DDoC, though as yet it has only argued about which platforms are included and how badly Musk’s X has flouted the basic transparency requirements. More serious enforcement may follow in 2026.
What will be the medium term international legal effects? The PM and his Minister were partying at Hugh Jackman’s pub after trying to sell the under 16 social media ban to the United Nations. The world is watching. The world’s most influential legislator, Ursula von der Leyen, stated this at the pre-pub UN event: “It is obvious this is plain common sense”. She had already stated this in her State of the Union speech on 10 September:
“As a mother of seven, and a grandmother of four, I feel the anxiety of parents who are doing their best to keep their children safe…drowning against the tsunami of Big Tech flooding their family homes…Our friends in Australia are pioneering a social media restriction. I am watching the implementation of their policy closely…I will commission a panel of experts to advise me by the end of this year on the best approach for Europe.”
The European Parliament voted in favour of a non-legislative report by Vice-President Schaldemose in November 2025, so such a legislative move may begin in 2026 when the infamous Audio Visual Media Services Directive (AVMSD) is due for revision.
The United States has had restrictions on under 13 uses of social media since 1998, and has revised its COPPA legislation this year, with an updated Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) Rule. As with deep fakes, where she unofficially sponsored a successful Take It Down Act in 2025, this is known to be an area that the First Lady Melania Trump is passionate about. The US response may be much less brutal than its pushback on other European inspired laws.
What are the long- term legal effects? AI and its many uses is the elephant in the room in this debate. It can be used to age verify, as for instance with facial recognition. It can make networks more cyber secure when users are required to upload sensitive personal data. It can also be used by hackers and criminals to exploit the unwary. Much of social media is now plagued with AI bot driven engagement. It will make the need for a DDoC even more pressing, in Australia, the UK, EU, and everywhere else. Last week, the Australian government declared in its National AI (Non) Plan that it had no intention of introducing an equivalent to the EU AI Act to deal with AI generated harms such as disinformation, though it has legislated against deepfakes. It shares this ‘masterly inactivity’, or regulatory hallucination, with the UK.
Digital platforms are the $trillion businesses charged with making “reasonable attempts” to secure their networks to stop exploitation of children. They may be required to do much more as the generative AI bubble bursts in 2026 or 2027. Do not be surprised if the bubble bursts so severely that it is not just social media that requires legislation, but a new Sarbanes-Oxley Act to root out the vast amounts of corporate fraud hiding in opaque sight in the bubble itself.
Deep fakes are running rampant in schools and a social media ban is a crude attempt to stop their circulation in the schoolyard. From 2002, it became obvious that the device alone with a Bluetooth connection is enough to spread such disgusting images. 2026 will see much worse, and a social media ban will sadly not protect children’s virtue. Iceland has experimented with both prosecution of under-16s but also education in digital media privacy and dignity in schools, led by the Police. Will Australia invest enough in the same?
There will be one other short term sociological effect online. The Ashes will remain Australian, and social media will be insufferable as they win this series 5-0.
Merry Christmas! I may be offline for some time.
Chris Marsden is Professor of Artificial Intelligence, Technology and the Law, and Director of the Digital Law Group at Monash University. He serves on the Australian Research Council College of Experts 2024-26. He was appointed a Fellow of Columbia CITI from November 2024. He is a Research Associate at GLOCOM (Tokyo) since 2008. He has been since 2020 a research affiliate of the PILOT Lab at Penn State University. He serves as an Expert in the International Expert Consortium on the Regulation, Economics, and Computer Science of AI (RECSAI) 2024-5. He has served on editorial/media boards of the Society for Computers and Law since 2010.
- Anthony Albanese – Prime Minister of Australia (2025) Social media firms face huge fines under new Australian ban, The Sunday Mail (Qld) December 7, 2025 – 5:00AM ↩︎
