By CHARLOTTE GRAHAM-McLAY
WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — Social media companies have revoked access to about 4.7 million accounts identified as belonging to children in Australia since the country banned use of the platforms by those under 16, officials said.
“We stared down everybody who said it couldn’t be done, some of the most powerful and rich companies in the world and their supporters,” communications minister Anika Wells told reporters on Friday. “Now Australian parents can be confident that their kids can have their childhoods back.”
The figures, reported to Australia’s government by 10 social media platforms, were the first to show the scale of the landmark ban since it was enacted in December over fears about the effects of harmful online environments on young people. The law provoked fraught debates in Australia about technology use, privacy, child safety and mental health and has prompted other countries to consider similar measures.
Officials said the figure was encouraging
Under Australian law, Facebook, Instagram, Kick, Reddit, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, X, YouTube and Twitch face fines of up to 49.5 million Australian dollars ($33.2 million) if they fail to take reasonable steps to remove the accounts of Australian children younger than 16. Messaging services such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger are exempt.
To verify age, platforms can either request copies of identification documents, use a third party to apply age estimation technology to an account holder’s face, or make inferences from data already available such has how long an account has been held.
About 2.5 million Australians are aged between 8 and 15, said the country’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, and past estimates suggested 84% of 8- to 12-year-olds held social media accounts. It was not known how many accounts were held across the 10 platforms but Inman Grant said the figure of 4.7 million “deactivated or restricted” was encouraging.
“We’re preventing predatory social media companies from accessing our children,” Inman Grant said.
The 10 biggest companies covered by the ban were compliant with it and had reported removal figures to Australia’s regulator on time, the commissioner said. She added that social media companies were expected to shift their efforts from enforcing the ban to preventing children from creating new accounts or otherwise circumventing the prohibition.
Meta removed 550,000 accounts
Australian officials didn’t break the figures down by platform. But Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, said this week that by the day after the ban came into effect it had removed nearly 550,000 accounts belonging to users understood to be under 16.
In the blog post divulging the figures, Meta criticized the ban and said smaller platforms where the ban doesn’t apply might not prioritize safety. The company also noted browsing platforms would still present content to children based on algorithms — a concern that led to the ban’s enactment.
The law was widely popular among parents and child safety campaigners. Online privacy advocates and some groups representing teenagers opposed it, with the latter citing the support found in online spaces by vulnerable young people or those geographically isolated in Australia’s sprawling rural areas.
Some said they had managed to fool age assessing technologies or were helped by parents or older siblings to circumvent the ban.
Other countries might follow
Since Australia began debating the measures in 2024, other countries have considered following suit. Denmark’s government is among them, saying in November that it had planned to implement a social media ban for children under 15.
“The fact that in spite of some skepticism out there, it’s working and being replicated now around the world, is something that is a source of Australian pride,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Friday.
Opposition lawmakers have suggested that young people have circumvented the ban easily or are migrating to other apps that are less scrutinized than the largest platforms. Inman Grant said Friday that data seen by her office showed a spike in downloads of alternative apps when the ban was enacted but not a spike in usage.
“There is no real long-term trends yet that we can say but we’re engaging,” she said.
Meanwhile, she said, the regulator she heads planned to introduce “world-leading AI companion and chatbot restrictions in March.” She didn’t disclose further details.
