Australia in a world-first move, has decided to be proactive about protecting children from the effects of social media by effectively banning all children under 16 from social media. What does this mean? It means that from 10 December 2025, anyone under 16 in Australia won’t be able to keep and use or make accounts on social media apps like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, X, Facebook and more. The Australian government passed a new law called the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024 on 28 November 2024. This is a big deal, and other countries will be watching Australia’s implementation of this law closely, to see if they can do the same in their countries. If your kids are all above 16, then nothing much changes for you. But if you have younger children, then you might want to continue reading.

What does the social media mean or imply?

Well, this law is really a piece of work and will affect how young children consume media. The law introduces a minimum age for users of certain (by certain they mean almost all popular) social media platforms. This means that anyone under the age of 16 will not be able to create, open accounts, or continue using the social media apps that are on this list from the 10th of December. Those with accounts who under 16 will have to be de-activated. In addition to this, critically, parents will not be able to consent to their children using those platforms. So even if you want your children and are ok with them on these social media apps, its literally illegal for them to be on the platforms. Social media companies could face hefty fines of up to $50 million if they are found not to be doing enough to remove under 16s from their platforms.

But why the social media ban for those under 16?

Social media started out a long time ago, boomed in the early 2000s with the advent of Myspace. MySpace was popular and the first real social media platform to go global. Even I, used to have a MySpace profile. Then Facebook came through around 2004-5 and it really pushed the envelope of social media. A raft of other companies came into existence at the same time. Actually the period from 2000-2010 was a very busy period with a lot of services launched including LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, X (formerly Twitter) and Instagram. Privacy wasn’t a big concern at this point in time and people generally were genuinely using social media to connect to friends and relatives. This was before most platforms monetised and had no ads (e.g. Facebook). Good times indeed.

However, as time went on, things started getting bad. Online bullying (cyberbullying) became prevalent. Children started having mental health issues associated with their use of social media. This included pressure created from the lives they saw online. More and more children were being exposed to harmful content, content which most couldn’t discern that it was harmful. Children also were placed in situations where they were vulnerable from predators online who pretended to be kids. A lot of bad things were happening online. As a parent with two under 16 children, from time to time, I check their social media use to make sure they don’t have issues associated with its use. But all that is going away now.

What will happen come the 16th of December?

From the 10th of December, online platforms are expected to deactivate all account for minors under the age of 16. This includes terminating all accounts, channels, and data associated with these accounts. I recently received from YouTube a notification saying that if I have children using managed YouTube accounts, they will be automatically logged out of YouTube. This is part of their email:

“While they may still be able to watch YouTube signed out, they will not be able to access certain features, including likes, subscriptions, memberships, and creating playlists. For teens who have a YouTube channel, it will no longer be visible to other users, and they will lose the ability to leave comments and upload new videos.”

Although this is just from YouTube, other social media apps are taking this seriously and will be sending similar emails or notifications especially for those accounts that they know are for under 16s.

How are the kids taking this?

I have a daughter who will be affected with this ban as she’s under 16. When this came into the limelight, I had a chat with her about what she thinks, and her first words were “this is a waste of time”. I asked what she meant and she said that all the kids were already looking for ways around this with the intention of continuing to use these apps. This had me concerned, because if she was thinking like this, it meant most kids are not seeing the benefit from this ban. Of course they wont see a benefit, its something that they were used to that’s being taken away. Parents would need to have discussions with their children to explain to them what this means and why its being done and why its important for them to be on the right side of this law. There are no repercussions for the families or kids that continue to defy this ban as the fines will be on the social media platforms themselves. But in order to make sure that they don’t get fined the 50 mil max fine, social media companies will start making life a bit difficult for users and would require some accounts to verify their ages including providing IDs where necessary. They might also use technology to automatically determine the age of the users based on the interactions the user has with the app.

What’s the ban list again?

The Communications minister has published a list of apps and platforms that are banned. You have all the usual suspects on the list. However, kids have vowed to move to less known apps to bypass the ban. In response to this, the minister has indicated that the list will keep growing in order to ban those platforms as well. Its going to a game of whack-a-mole for the first year after the ban goes into effect.

YouTube, X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Reddit, Twitch, Threads and Kick

Apps like Messenger Kids, WhatsApp, Kids Helpline, Google Classroom, YouTube Kids, and Discord are currently expected to be exempt from the ban. Similarly, Roblox, another popular game among children, has also been spared from the naughty list.

The Minister has already indicated that this list will change anytime they feel “harm has been transferred” to a new platform. This means that if a new platform, or a previously not popular platform, suddenly has an influx of under-16s, and the harm they are trying to mitigate manifests on those apps, those platforms will be added to the ban list as well. This basically puts every platform on notice, meaning they shouldn’t celebrate any new influx of users too much, as those users might just be under-16 users who could trigger their addition to the ban list.

What do others think of this ban?

Well besides the children, not all grown up are enthused about this ban. A few of those not so happy comments below:

• This is perhaps one of the most ill-conceived pieces of legislation a government has ever come up with. A noble cause for sure, but it simply won’t work. It’s borderline an overreach.
• How much of our money is going to be spent chasing what could be new platform after new platform in the courts?
• Power trip, death of democracy
• Kids of today are far too smart for this government.
• Megalomania is what you get when un-elected bureaucrats get too much power and become Dictators. Answerable to no one.

Statement from YouTube on their thoughts of this new legislation

“At YouTube, we believe in protecting kids in the digital world, not from the digital world. That’s why we’ve invested for more than a decade in consultation with child development experts to build age-appropriate products for our youngest users, like YouTube Kids, supervised experiences for teens and tweens, default wellbeing settings for all teens and robust parental controls. As the Social Media Minimum Age Act requires kids to use YouTube without an account, it removes the very parental controls and safety filters built to protect them—it will not make kids safer on our platform. These are the unfortunate consequences of a rushed legislative process that failed to allow for adequate consultation and consideration of the real complexities of online safety regulation.”

Conclusion

Personally, I feel that doing more to ensure online safety children is a big win for everyone. At a fundamental level, I don’t think anyone disagrees with this point. The issue in this case stems from the how part. Some see this as good, whilst other people feel this will reduce safety for kids online as they will now work outside the purview of the social media companies. When the ban comes into effect, social media platforms will not be able to protect those children anymore as the law says they are not meant to be online for those platforms. Those that then defy this and go online cannot be protected. Most social media companies were advocating for strengthening tools that help protect children online rather than an outline ban. This sounds good but take it with a grain of salt. These companies benefit financially from having as many users as possible including children on their platforms. In addition, catching them young means they stay on their platforms for longer even when they come of age, meaning more revenues for the companies.

The problem of harm online for children is not going to go away. Time will only tell if this law from the Australian government will be enough to reduce this harm. As a father with under 16 kids, I’ll be following all this very closely.

Till next time, happy browsing