Australia’s teen social media ban has yet to deliver, as government scrambles to defend world-first policy
When Anthony Albanese stood before Australians last month and described parliamentary scrutiny of his government’s proposed changes to the teen social media ban as “outrageous,” his tone suggested a policy in crisis and a leader in a hurry. The legislation, which prevents under-16s from holding accounts on major social media platforms, had been in development for more than two years. Yet the government seemed suddenly impatient with democratic process, eager to pass amendments that would double fines for non-compliant companies. The urgency seemed puzzling: just weeks earlier, Albanese had declared the ban a success, even though it had barely started operating. Now, eight months after the law came into effect, the reasons for the government’s anxiety are clearer. The world-first reform, championed as a way to get teenagers back onto sporting fields and away from harmful feeds, has produced little visible change. According to the eSafety Commissioner’s first expert-led study, 81.5 per cent of teenagers are still using social media — a marginal drop from the 85.9 per cent recorded before the ban. The number of teens with registered accounts has fallen by 20 per cent, but because the law does not require platforms to block logged-out use, many young Australians can still access content without an account. The promising headline was undercut by the reality that most teen behaviour is unchanged. The research found no significant improvements in offline activities, problematic internet use, wellbeing, or parental stress. Instead, one of the most notable findings was that parents are now more in the dark than ever: the share of parents unaware that their teenager had used social media rose from 23 per cent to 33 per cent. Far from giving families greater visibility and control, the ban appears to have pushed teen activity further into the shadows. The government’s promise that the ban would help parents reclaim their children’s attention has not materialised in the data.
The eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, who leads the independent regulator tasked with enforcing the ban, also acknowledged at a parliamentary inquiry on Friday that the office had observed a rise in messaging and gaming use among teens. Both are excluded from the ban, but both undercut the government’s core promise to get kids “back onto the footy field.” If teenagers are simply shifting their social interactions to platforms and services that are not covered by the law, the ban may be changing where young people spend their time, not how much time they spend online. Online child safety group SmackTalk’s founder, Wayne Holesworth, told the hearing that it would take three to five years for the ban’s effects to be fully felt. That may be true, but it is still remarkable that, eight months after the policy came into effect, the most positive case for the ban is essentially that it has not yet been implemented properly enough to judge. The government, for its part, has pointed the finger at social media companies, accusing them of failing to enforce the ban and arguing that bigger penalties are needed. Age-check providers have weighed in with equally ominous warnings, with one firm submitting that large fines may be treated as a “small price to pay” if copping them allows the ban to be “wrongly” portrayed as a failure. But the legislation as written only requires technology companies to take “reasonable steps” to keep teenagers off their platforms. The fact that most teens are still there is not, in itself, proof that companies have breached the law. Inman Grant has said investigations into five major platforms are ongoing, but no findings have been published. The legal ambiguity, combined with the research showing minimal change, leaves the government in a difficult position: it must argue both that the ban’s principles are sound and that its enforcement has been inadequate, while also claiming that it is too early to assess the outcome.
It is easy to say in hindsight that no one could have predicted how a world-first ban would unfold. But public submissions made before the law was legislated in November 2024 suggest that experts and child welfare groups had a remarkably clear picture of what was likely to happen. The Australian Human Rights Commission warned that technological workarounds would undermine the success of the ban. The Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth said that bans would drive young people to other places. Academics Marcus Carter, Taylor Hardwick and Ben Egliston predicted that children’s social media use would become “more private, and more hidden.” Perhaps most presciently, the eSafety Commissioner’s own submission warned that age restriction efforts on platforms were already ineffective in practice and that bans by themselves would not teach young people to use the internet more safely. That submission came from the very regulator now tasked with enforcing the law. These warnings were not obscure or hard to find; they were part of the formal consultation process that informed the legislation. The fact that the government pressed ahead, and now expresses surprise that teenagers remain on platforms, suggests either that it did not listen to the advice it received or that it believed the political benefits of the ban outweighed the technical and practical obstacles. Either way, the result is a policy that was designed with built-in vulnerabilities. The government explicitly wrote into law that platforms could not rely solely on ID checks and had to offer other, less accurate methods of age verification. The law’s porousness is not an accident; it is a design choice intended to balance privacy concerns and enforcement practicality. But that choice has consequences, and those consequences are now visible in the data. The government has called social media companies “sharks” and accused them of causing social harm, but it then structured a law that left the details of enforcement to the very companies it claimed could not be trusted. To borrow the government’s own metaphor, it is like letting sharks design the shark nets.
The government’s proposed remedial fix — doubling the size of fines — has been presented as a tough response. But the logic is questionable. If the problem is that platforms have not complied with a loosely defined duty, larger penalties will only help if the government can prove non-compliance. No such proof has yet been made public. If the problem is that the ban is inherently difficult to enforce, then bigger fines will simply make the law more punitive without making it more effective. Inman Grant has said investigations into five major platforms are continuing, and the government has signalled that it wants new powers to require tech companies to prove their compliance. But this raises an obvious question: why were those powers not built into the law in the first place? The government spent years developing the policy, consulted widely, and knew from the start that it was dealing with platforms that had repeatedly failed to protect young users. It could have designed a law with rigorous enforcement mechanisms from day one. Instead, it chose a framework that gave platforms discretion, then expressed outrage when they used that discretion. The fact that the government is now scrambling to amend the law suggests that the original design was not a carefully calibrated compromise, but a political calculation that the appearance of action was more important than the details of implementation. The result is a policy that has generated enormous attention globally, inspired other countries to consider similar measures, and yet has not delivered the outcomes Australian families were promised. The government’s urgency to pass amendments is understandable: every month that passes with little change makes the ban harder to defend as a flagship achievement.
The deeper problem may be that the ban has consumed the political and bureaucratic energy that could have been invested in more effective online safety measures. Since November 2024, the Albanese government has said it intends to introduce a digital duty of care, a policy that would give technology companies a broad obligation to mitigate and reduce harms from their services. That legislation has still not been brought before parliament, and it may be years away from implementation. A digital duty of care would be a fundamentally different approach: instead of attempting to wall off young people from social media, it would require platforms to make their products safer for everyone, with proactive risk assessment, harm prevention, and accountability. It is impossible to know with certainty what would have happened if the government had pursued that path with the same energy and determination it devoted to the ban. But it seems likely that the ban has taken up oxygen and resources that could have been used elsewhere. The government has promoted the ban internationally, taken it to the United Nations, and now faces legal challenges from technology companies. All of that effort and attention has come at a cost. The opportunity cost of the ban is not just the money spent on defending it, but the time not spent building a regulatory framework that could actually change the behaviour of powerful platforms. Australians are understandably worried about the effect of social media on young people’s mental health, body image, and safety. That worry is real and justified. The ban was a response to that anxiety, and its popularity reflects a genuine desire for action. But if the government’s goal is to improve the lives of young people, it must be willing to measure the policy against that goal, rather than against its own political investment.
At some point, the same concern for young people that drove the ban should lead the government to reconsider its commitment to a policy that has produced little measurable benefit. It is not surprising that a world-first ban is imperfect out of the gate; every new regulatory regime suffers from teething problems. But the evidence so far is not merely underwhelming. It shows that the ban has not reduced teen social media use significantly, has not improved wellbeing, has not alleviated parental stress, and may have weakened parental awareness of what their children are doing online. It has also pushed some young people toward messaging and gaming platforms that are outside the law’s reach, and it has done little to address the underlying business model of social media companies, which profits from engagement regardless of age. The government can wait another year or two to see if the ban’s effects emerge, and it is reasonable to allow time for enforcement and cultural change. But the question is how much more time and public money should be spent on a policy that has already failed to meet its early targets. If the government was truly in a hurry last month, it should be in a hurry now to explain why its flagship policy has so little to show for itself, and why it is still waiting for results while teenagers continue to scroll. The ban was sold as a decisive intervention, not an experiment. Yet eight months in, the most honest assessment is that the experiment is still ongoing, the results are unclear, and the very urgency Albanese displayed suggests that he knows the window for declaring the ban a success is closing. The teens Australia was trying to protect have not been protected yet. They are still online, still hidden from their parents, and still waiting for a policy that actually works. The government, in its rush to defend its legacy, has not yet offered a convincing answer.
