Technology & Science
Meta Begins Early Purge of Under-16 Australian Accounts Ahead of 10 Dec Social-Media Ban
On 20 Nov 2025 Meta said it will start deactivating every Australian Facebook, Instagram and Threads account held by 13- to 15-year-olds on 4 Dec—six days before Canberra’s under-16 social-media prohibition legally kicks in.
Focusing Facts
- Platforms that miss the 10 Dec deadline face fines up to A$49.5 million (≈US$32 million) per breach under Australia’s amended Online Safety Act.
- Roughly 350,000 Instagram and 150,000 Facebook Australian accounts in the 13-15 age cohort are scheduled for removal, government figures show.
- The restriction initially targets nine services (Facebook, Instagram, Threads, TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, X, Kick, Reddit); gaming/messaging apps like Roblox and Discord are temporarily exempt.
Context
States have long intervened to shield minors from newly dominant media—U.S. radio licences in the 1934 Communications Act barred children from certain broadcasts, and COPPA (1998) banned U-13 data collection online. Australia’s 2025 move echoes those episodes but goes further by excluding minors entirely, foreshadowing a more muscular sovereignty over borderless platforms. The policy rides two intersecting mega-trends: mounting evidence (and moral panic) around adolescent mental-health harm from algorithmic feeds, and governments’ search for workable age-verification in an age of deepfakes and digital IDs. Whether the law endures or fizzles, it tests the feasibility of enforcing age-gating at national scale and may accelerate the splintering of the global internet into jurisdiction-specific rule-sets—a dynamic that, over a 100-year horizon, could matter as much as the breakup of the Bell System or the 1995 EU Data-Protection Directive in defining who controls the architecture of human communication.
Perspectives
Tech-industry statements
Meta and its spokespeople, echoed in several wire-service reports — They argue the new Australian law is vague and rushed and that banning teens outright will unfairly sever them from friends and online communities while still being hard to police. Meta’s bottom line depends on youth engagement; highlighting practical difficulties and possible ‘mistakes’ serves to preserve its user base and fend off stricter global copy-cat rules.
Government-friendly and regulation-celebrating outlets
e.g., WION, Newsfirst — They hail the measure as a world-first victory that protects children, proves democracies can rein in Big Tech, and showcases bipartisan resolve in Canberra. By celebrating political success, they gloss over implementation hurdles and echo official talking points to frame the ban as a decisive public-health win.
Privacy advocates, academic experts and some progressive politicians quoted in domestic Australian coverage
Privacy advocates, academic experts and some progressive politicians quoted in domestic Australian coverage — They warn the ban may be largely symbolic, could push youths to riskier sites and introduces intrusive age-verification that edges toward mass surveillance and identity-theft risks. Their focus on civil-liberties costs and technical flaws may underplay documented mental-health harms from social-media use and dismiss incremental safety gains.