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TRANSCRIPT
This month saw the e-Safety Commission threaten to sue social media companies for flouting the ban on under-16s.
It is investigating some of the biggest platforms for suspected non-compliance with the world-first measure, targeting Meta’s Instagram and Facebook, and Google’s YouTube, Snapchat and TikTok.
The legal threat - and a potential hefty fine of millions of dollars - is a striking change of tone from a government which had initially hailed tech giants' shows of cooperation when the ban went live in December 2025.
Professor Jeannie Paterson, co-director at the University of Melbourne’s Centre for AI and Digital Ethics, said the global attention on Australia’s handling of the ban could have spurred on the government’s crackdown announcement.
“This is certainly a moment in time when a number of countries across the world have just lost patience with the claim of social media companies to present some sort of town square for the sharing of views. There’s instance after instance of harmful content being shared and the very design of social media being addictive and causing real mental health and developmental issues in young people, I think this is a moment in time where we’re seeing a response in all sorts of countries, including, and I think we need to come back to it, the U.S.”
Professor Paterson points out the recent lawsuit in the U.S. which found Meta and Google liable for social media addiction harm, saying that the pressure is building on the tech companies to change.
She says the social media companies are not living up to their initial promises.
“The social media ban requires effectively, reasonable efforts to prevent children under the required age from accessing social media and the government has listed a series of failings on the part of the tech companies which as I said, suggest one, their measures aren’t effective and two, they’re not learning from the failings and improving the strategies.”
Senior research associate at the University of Sydney, Dr Rob Nicholls says the combination of the U-S lawsuit and the rising number of countries thinking about enforcing youth social media bans would likely push platforms to implement changes to eliminate litigation risks.
He says more countries should consider following the lead of Australia.
“If you like to say and like to boast, we’ve got the first system in the world and we’re world-leading, you naturally get some pressure, which is the rest of the world looking to see, should we be following, are we right to be following in the case of U.K. and France. I think though that the case in the U.S. will have a different impact, so in the U.S., for the first time, a jury found that the platform and not the content caused addiction and that addiction caused harm for one person in Los Angeles.”
The e-Safety report says nearly one-third of Australia's parents claimed that their under-16 child had at least one social media account after the ban took effect, of which two-thirds said the platform had not asked the child's age.
Dr Nicholls says if Australia's method works, and other countries follow suit, then there's a good chance that the social media companies will look to make system-wide changes.
He says if they don't, it won't only be users facing a problem:
“The risk is two parts, one for the people who become addicted but also the litigation risk for Meta and Google, let’s just eliminate that, and if we can do that in a way that helps in countries which have introduced a social media ban, then we’ll do it once and get it right rather than trying to do it in lots of different versions of Instagram all around the world.”
