Took a wrong turn? Australia's social media ban is not a role model

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The social media ban for under-16s, which has been in effect in Australia since December 2025, is being circumvented in various ways and at the same time making less regulated platforms like 4chan more attractive. Tom Sulston of Digital Rights Watch Australia calls the ban a victory for symbolic politics over genuine measures to protect children and young people online. Technical experts warn of collateral damage to data protection.

Two months after the ban on ten social media platforms for under-16s came into force, the Australian government celebrated itself as a pioneer in child protection in the digital world.

e-Safety Commissioner: No deaths, further steps planned

The responsible e-Safety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, praised the review and closure of 4.7 million accounts by Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, X, YouTube, Reddit, Twitch, Kick, and Threads on the occasion of Safer Internet Day. Given a total of 2.3 million 8-15 year olds in the Australian population, this is “a good start.”

She promised to rigorously ensure that the platforms correctly implement the law and defended herself against criticism: “As an AI-generated Mark Twain would have extrapolated, reports of deaths from the social media ban are greatly exaggerated.”

The next steps could include extending the bans to other platforms, such as gaming platforms, as well as search engines that have already been asked to verify age.

Ineffective ban, undesirable side effects

However, there are currently no reliable figures on how many young people have actually been banned, said Tom Sulston, policy expert at the Digital Rights Watch organization, at the invitation of the European digital policy think tank “Interface.”

The government had given the platforms a lot of leeway in the technical implementation of the age verification required for the ban. When scanning faces for age determination, young people used all sorts of tricks to appear older. In any case, the corresponding software is not very accurate, according to Sulston. If an ID document is required, older siblings or friends are simply used.

According to reports in Australian media, young people themselves experience the age verification by the platforms as completely erratic.

The technical shortcomings are not the main problem, Sulston believes. Rather, he criticizes that Australia's government claims to have made children safer online with the ban. “It doesn't change anything about the negative consequences of surveillance capitalism for children and all of us,” he said in the Interface expert discussion. Rather, the platforms collect even more data, such as facial scans or ID information.

Representatives of a youth helpline, incidentally, warned of the effect that particularly vulnerable groups would be prevented from exchanging information with like-minded people about special emergencies.

Data protection problems, censorship possibilities, concentration effects

Good technical concepts for implementing age verification are difficult – and practically impossible to achieve without negative effects. This was noted by developers at a workshop at the invitation of the Internet Architecture Board and the World Wide Web Consortium last year.

The combination of age verification without special measures to protect children's personal data would be hardly conceivable in the EU, wrote a group of researchers from CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, the Lausanne University of Applied Sciences and the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy.

However, privacy-enhancing technologies are neither a guarantee that age checks will not be circumvented nor can they fundamentally prevent data leakage. Moreover, they introduce control points that can fundamentally be misused for censorship measures. Furthermore, not least due to their respective complexity, they could further intensify the already existing concentration in the platform market. In addition, data protection experts fear that circumvention techniques such as VPNs could become subject to bans.

EU countries emulating the Australian model, including Spain, France, Denmark, Portugal, and Germany – as well as the EU as a whole – would be well advised to take the warnings from the tech community more seriously than their colleagues Down Under.

(mack)