By Addison Thompson 
Australia’s ban on social media accounts for under-16s took effect on December 10, 2025, making it the first country to enforce a nationwide minimum age for platforms including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube. Nine months later, the country’s own regulator says the law is not doing what it was designed to do: a majority of the children it targeted are still on the platforms it was meant to keep them off.
What Australia’s law actually requires
Under the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act, platforms deemed “age-restricted social media platforms” by the eSafety Commissioner must take “reasonable steps” to prevent Australians under 16 from holding accounts, or face fines of up to A$49.5 million. The obligation falls on the platforms, not on parents or children, and there is no penalty for a minor who circumvents the restriction.
Meta says it removed more than 750,000 under-16 accounts across Facebook and Instagram as of June 30, 2026, over 500,000 of them before the law even took effect, using AI systems that scan for contextual clues such as school references or birthday mentions, plus simplified reporting tools for parents. The company also ran an education campaign reaching roughly 1.3 million people between June and July 2026, according to its own compliance update.
The eSafety Commissioner’s own numbers say it isn’t working
A three-month review by eSafety found that more than 80% of under-16s were still using social media after the ban began, down only modestly from 86% before it took effect. Daily use among teenagers dropped from around 60% to roughly 58% — a small decline, not the collapse the law’s backers anticipated. The regulator’s own explanation: “social media platforms’ failure to implement effective age assurance measures” was the main reason kids kept their accounts, whether by never being asked to verify age, by self-declaring as 16 or older, or by age-inference systems misjudging them as adults, as Al Jazeera reported. Assistant Minister Andrew Leigh defended the law regardless, comparing it to minimum drinking-age rules where “we never expected 100 percent compliance.”
The UK takes a slower, code-based route
Britain’s approach under the Online Safety Act runs on a different timeline. Ofcom’s children’s safety duties, including a requirement for “highly effective age assurance” on services carrying pornography or other harmful content, took effect on July 25, 2025. Ofcom’s own Use of Age Assurance Report, published in July 2026, found checks being deployed “at an unprecedented scale” across pornography, dating and social media services in the law’s first six months, but it also concluded that social media companies had “failed to enforce their minimum age requirements properly” and that age-inference methods — guessing a user’s age from behavior rather than verifying it — remain inadequate. Ofcom said it would deliver a rapid assessment by October 2026 on whether to impose Australia-style under-16 restrictions, with any such rules unlikely to bite before 2027.
The US fight is happening state by state, in court
No federal age-verification law for social media exists in the United States, so the action has shifted to states, and it keeps running into the First Amendment. NetChoice, the tech industry’s litigation arm, has won a string of rulings: a federal judge blocked Nebraska’s law from taking effect in July 2026, a permanent injunction froze Louisiana’s age-check statute, and Virginia’s restrictions remain paused pending appeal, according to Biometric Update’s August 2026 roundup. Tennessee’s law got a partial revival in August 2026 when the Sixth Circuit reopened NetChoice’s constitutional challenge, while the Ninth Circuit declined to broadly block California’s minor-protection law. The Supreme Court’s June 2025 ruling in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, which upheld Texas’s age-verification requirement for pornography sites under a more lenient legal standard, has made it harder to challenge age checks for adult content — but courts continue treating social media restrictions as speech regulation subject to stricter scrutiny, and most have not survived. Mississippi’s law faces a similar challenge in NetChoice v. Fitch, and a separate Missouri statute, House Bill 1839, took a different route by targeting pornography rather than social media directly: it requires third-party age verification through government ID, digital ID or transactional records, or lets sites geoblock Missouri users instead, backed by fines of up to $10,000 a day and as much as $250,000 if a minor accesses restricted material.
Where enforcement is heading next
California’s Digital Age Assurance Act, via Assembly Bill 1856, points to where regulators may be converging: instead of asking each app to verify age individually, it will require Apple, Google, Microsoft and other operating-system makers to collect age data at device or account setup starting January 1, 2027, then share age brackets — not birthdates — with apps. Meta has made the same argument publicly, calling for “a single reliable age signal delivered at the operating system or app store level” rather than repeated verification inside every app.
That shift matters because the eSafety and Ofcom findings point to the same underlying weakness: platform-level self-declaration and behavioral age-inference are easy for a motivated teenager to beat, while device-level checks tied to an account set up by a parent are harder to route around without a second device entirely. Whether OS-level signals consolidate into a workable cross-border standard, or simply relocate the same enforcement gaps up one layer of the stack, is the open question heading into 2027, and it is one Australia, the UK and California are now, in effect, running as three separate live experiments.
Sources
- eSafety Commissioner: Social media age restrictions
- Meta: Compliance with Australia’s under-16 ban
- Al Jazeera: Australia’s under-16 ban failing, study shows
- Ofcom: Use of Age Assurance Report 2026
- Biometric Update: US age assurance enters implementation phase