SYDNEY — Meta Platforms began shutting down hundreds of thousands of Australian teen social media accounts Thursday ahead of a world-first under-16 access law, triggering early lockouts across Instagram, Facebook and Threads as the country prepares to bar minors from most major platforms, Dec. 4, 2025.
The early closures come six days before platforms must block users under 16 or face fines of up to A$49.5 million, as TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube move to comply with what has become known as the Australia social media ban. Government figures suggest about 96 per cent of Australian under-16s — more than a million young people — currently use social media, turning the rollout into a sudden reset of how teenagers communicate, learn and socialise.
The Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024, which comes into force on Dec. 10, amends the Online Safety Act 2021 and requires “age-restricted social media platforms” to take reasonable steps to prevent Australians under 16 from holding accounts. Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant has described the law as a global “tipping point” in efforts to rein in Big Tech, telling a cyber policy forum that she expects other countries to closely watch the experiment, according to a Reuters report.
How the Australian social media ban will work
Under the new rules, the burden falls on companies, not children. An official guide from the eSafety Commissioner stresses that “it’s not a ban, it’s a delay to having accounts”: under-16s and their parents will face no penalties for accessing services, but platforms can be hit with multimillion-dollar civil fines if they don’t take “reasonable steps” to keep teen accounts off their sites.
In practice, Meta is locking about 500,000 accounts it believes belong to 13- to 15-year-olds and telling them to download their photos and messages or place their profiles in a “frozen” state until they turn 16. Other services are taking similar approaches. A detailed explainer in The Guardian lists Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, X, Reddit, Twitch, Kick, YouTube and Threads among the platforms that must deactivate teen accounts, while services such as Roblox, YouTube Kids, Discord and WhatsApp are currently exempt.
Parents, teens and platforms split over impact.
Supporters of the Australia social media ban frame it as a public-health measure to blunt what they see as a youth mental-health crisis linked to endless scrolling. International research summarised this week by health outlets points to associations between heavy social media use and poor sleep, body-image pressures, lower school performance and heightened emotional distress, even as experts caution that cause and effect remain hard to untangle. Pro-ban voices, including some clinicians, argue that waiting for perfect evidence would mean letting another generation grow up in an uncontrolled experiment.
Critics of the Australian social media ban worry the policy is too blunt. Civil liberties groups, some academics and at least two 15-year-old plaintiffs have launched or backed legal challenges that argue the law will push young people to less regulated corners of the internet, make it harder for marginalised teens to find support and chill political speech. Platforms, including Google’s YouTube, previously warned lawmakers that account-level bans “fundamentally misunderstand” how teens use the internet, even as they have now pledged to comply by signing out users linked to under-16 Google accounts and blocking new teen sign-ups.
Years in the making
The crackdown is the latest step in more than a decade of Australian efforts to police online harms. In 2019, lawmakers passed the Sharing of Abhorrent Violent Material legislation targeting live-streamed atrocities in the wake of the Christchurch terrorist attack, threatening stiff penalties for platforms that failed to quickly remove such footage, as detailed in reporting by The Guardian at the time. Two years later, the Online Safety Act 2021 expanded the eSafety Commissioner’s powers over cyberbullying, image-based abuse and illegal content.
By 2024, momentum had shifted explicitly toward keeping children off social media altogether. A 2024 analysis by ABC News chronicled national debates over age-assurance technology, with tech firms warning of privacy risks and practicality problems if every user had to prove their age. The social media minimum-age law that followed — now branded globally as the Australia social media ban — tries to split the difference: it gives companies flexibility in how they verify age, promises a review within two years and leaves courts, regulators, parents and teens to decide whether this bold experiment protects children or simply reshapes life online.
