Technology & Science
Australia Enacts First National Under-16 Social-Media Ban
On 10 Dec 2025, Australia began enforcing a law that forces ten major platforms to delete existing under-16 accounts and block new ones, making age-verification mandatory nationwide.
Focusing Facts
- Platforms that fail to comply face civil penalties up to AU$49.5 million per violation.
- Parliament approved the Online Safety Amendment after only nine days of debate, overruling warnings from the Human Rights Commission and digital-rights groups.
- Journalists documented teens bypassing the ban within minutes by using photos of parents, Beyoncé, and even a golden retriever to fool facial-verification systems.
Context
The move echoes past moral-panic legislation such as the 1954 U.S. Senate inquiry that led to the Comics Code Authority—measures that tried to shield youth from new media but were soon undermined by work-arounds and shifting norms. It also follows a trajectory started with the 1998 U.S. COPPA law and the EU’s 2018 GDPR-K, pushing age-gating deeper into the architecture of the internet. By hard-wiring biometric checks into everyday log-ins, Australia signals a turn toward state-mandated identity proofs that could outlast the child-safety debate and reshape civil liberties for decades. Whether the ban endures or dissolves, its real historical importance may be as a test case in the century-long struggle to balance privacy, free expression and paternal protection in an increasingly digitized public sphere.
Perspectives
Mainstream broadcast outlets
ABC7, Channel 3000/CNN wire, Australian Broadcasting Corporation — They portray Australia’s under-16 social-media ban as a welcome child-protection step that other countries – and even individual parents – should copy to curb addiction, bullying and predators online. By foregrounding alarming anecdotes and early research linking apps to self-harm, they gloss over questions of enforceability, civil-liberty trade-offs and the evidence gaps experts cite.
Tech libertarian / digital-rights media
Techdirt — They argue the ban is a panic-driven, evidence-free ‘cluster-f***’ that will alienate teens, endanger vulnerable kids by cutting support networks and prove useless because it’s easy to bypass. Their long-standing commitment to internet freedom leads them to dismiss or minimise studies on social-media harms while casting regulators as buffoons, so the costs of inaction receive little attention.
U.S. conservative commentary outlets
Townhall, Fox News — They claim government bans usurp parental authority, weaken families and expand state power, contending that engaged parents—not bureaucrats—should decide if teens go online. Skepticism of regulation aligns with small-government ideology, so the pieces stress personal responsibility and freedom while downplaying evidence that many parents struggle to police tech giants on their own.