Australia Readies Lawsuits Against Meta, TikTok and YouTube as Teen Social Media Ban Proves Ineffective

Australia is preparing to haul Meta, TikTok, Snap Inc., and Google into court for failing to keep children off their apps, even as it fights in its own highest court to save the world-first ban those companies are accused of flouting.The communications minister, Anika Wells, said on October 20 that she expects the government to sue over Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube. The announcement came after the regulator’s own survey found more than eight in 10 kids were slipping past the ban.Reddit filed its challenge days after the ban took effect last December. It argues the law violates Australia’s implied freedom of political communication by shutting out every Australian under 16 from political discussion on covered platforms and forcing “intrusive and potentially insecure” age checks on everyone. In a reply made public on Monday, Reddit told the court that the ban reduces young people’s political life on social media to passively receiving information. The case is due to be heard in November.The company also says the risk reduction is minimal at best because many people can view its content without an account. As a fallback, it wants the court to strike Reddit from the list of restricted platforms, calling itself a forum for adults. A Sydney rights group, the Digital Freedom Project, has brought a parallel case on behalf of two 15-year-olds.Canberra is pushing back hard. In a submission to the High Court filed at the end of September, the government argued that “credible risks” to young people justify the restrictions, even while conceding the evidence tying social media use to harm is uncertain.The country’s solicitor-general, Stephen Donaghue, is leading the defense, and the attorneys general of New South Wales, South Australia and Western Australia have lined up behind the government. Reddit says it is complying with the law while the case proceeds.The law took effect December 10, 2025. It requires 10 platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, X and Reddit, to take “reasonable steps” to prevent Australians under 16 from holding accounts. Children and parents face no penalty.Canberra’s go-to figure is more than 5 million under-16 accounts it says it has blocked. That number counts accounts, not children, and plenty of teenagers keep spares.That debate has an impact far beyond Australia. The European Union, Britain, France and a string of Asian governments are drafting their own versions, and California is already moving to rein in addictive features. Canberra’s experiment has become the world’s test case. If the country that went first can’t keep kids off the apps, should anyone else follow?A computer scientist studying how teenagers get around the ban says the technology is not the problem.“It’s not a case of ‘if only we built something better, we’d achieve our goals.’ We’re already there. The problem is that the technology doesn’t seem to solve the actual problem we care about,” a senior lecturer in computing and information systems at the University of Melbourne, Shaanan Cohney, tells The New York Sun.Half the Kids Say No One Checked Their AgeIn March, three months after the ban kicked in, the eSafety Commissioner’s office revisited 4,000-plus Australian children and families that it had surveyed earlier, and published the results in July. The situation had barely changed. Just over 81 percent of kids were still using at least one restricted platform, down from almost 86 percent, according to the findings.Daily scrolling dipped only from about 60 percent to 58 percent, while fewer parents knew what their children were doing online.Asked how they kept their accounts, about half the kids said nobody ever checked their age. Some had profiles that already said 16 or older. Others got waved through by face-scanning software that pegged them as adults.University of Newcastle researchers who followed 408 teenagers in New South Wales over the same period reached a similar conclusion. Their peer-reviewed study found more than 85 percent of under-16s still on the banned platforms, and up to one in five admitted to running a fake account.The workarounds also travel down the age ladder. Mr. Cohney’s forthcoming research, which finds that facial age estimation works in many cases, shows teenagers are building a culture of bypassing the ban that isn’t confined to any single age group.“Today’s 13-year-olds might speak to today’s 12-year-olds, and when those 12-year-olds turn 13, they’ll pass it on to the next year,” he says.Security specialists say none of this should surprise anyone.“Not to be cliché, but kids will be kids. Since the start of the consumer internet, it has been a place where rules are often broken, and people seek to express themselves,” the advisory solutions director at the cybersecurity firm TrustedSec, Alex Hamerston, tells the Sun.A watertight system, Mr. Hamerston continues, would tie every account to a verified identity, likely through a national ID card or number for young people, carrying fresh privacy risks. “Enforcement of a ban like this would require draconian measures,” he explains.Canberra Doubles DownSince March, the eSafety Commissioner has been investigating Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube for possible noncompliance. On June 27, the government said it would raise the maximum penalty for systemic breaches to about $76 million and let the regulator demand documents from platforms, app stores and third-party vendors offering age-checking technology. Those powers took effect September 12, and the regulator is now using them to build its cases.Ms. Wells accused the companies of “doing the bare minimum to get by.” In a speech this month, she insisted the law is not the problem; the platforms, she said, are the ones failing to comply.After the July findings, the assistant minister, Andrew Leigh, countered that the government never expected full compliance, likening the ban to minimum drinking age laws that teenagers also break.Mr. Cohney, who notes that America’s drinking age of 21 brought side effects such as binge drinking, doubts bigger fines will change the picture.“Even if they care more, this isn’t a problem that’s amenable to solution in the way the government thinks it is,” he says.Others argue the yardstick itself is wrong.“A fall in account numbers demonstrates that a regulation can change account ownership dynamics. It does not, by itself, demonstrate that the regulation has made children safer or healthier,” a professor of digital communication and director of the Digital Media Research Center at Queensland University of Technology, Daniel Angus, tells the Sun.On the underlying question of harm, which sits at the center of the court fight, Mr. Cohney says the science is murky.“That doesn’t mean social media isn’t harmful, or that it’s safe. It’s that we haven’t yet collected solid enough evidence to be sure,” he continues.So is it working? More than 10 months in, by the government’s own numbers, barely.Taxpayers are paying more than $33 million over four years to enforce the law, plus about $4 million for the age-assurance trial meant to prove it could work. Usage, meanwhile, is almost exactly where it started, and children’s Reddit use actually rose.The workarounds are low-tech: a fake birthday, a borrowed account, a burner profile or a private browser. Very few kids even bother with a VPN.“There is clearly an enforcement problem: many children who retained accounts report that platforms simply never checked their age; many others were able to easily sidestep the measures via older siblings, parents/guardians, or other techniques,” Mr. Angus points out.Those who do log off may not be heading outside.“The evidence suggests that instead of going outside more, young people substitute other online behaviors, such as platforms that aren’t covered, like online gaming platforms, or platforms that produce more of a parasocial effect than a purely social one,” Mr. Cohney says.That leaves governments with the hardest part still in front of them.“Even if getting a ban in place may be challenging politically, that challenge pales in comparison to enforcement,” Mr. Hamerston says.The World Copies the HeadlineNone of this has slowed imitators. Indonesia has barred under-16s since March and Malaysia since June. On September 16, the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, proposed banning social media for children under 13 across the European Union, allowing only parent-supervised “mini accounts” until 15.The road has been rocky. France’s Constitutional Council struck down an under-15 ban in August on free-expression grounds, and President Emmanuel Macron has vowed a new version by spring. Britain plans an under-16 ban by spring 2027.Canada introduced a bill in June, and New Zealand followed in August. California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, signed a law on September 10 barring addictive features such as autoplay and personalized feeds for users under 16, starting January 1, 2027.Child-safety advocates in Britain see Australia as a warning.“The Australian lesson is showing a lack of compliance from tech companies who are failing to remove accounts of under-16s. But our own data in the UK shows 68 percent of teens think peers would circumvent a ban,” the chief executive of the Molly Rose Foundation, Andy Burrows, tells the Sun. The Molly Rose Foundation is a youth-oriented charity focused on suicide prevention and online safety.Kids hiding on banned apps are less likely to seek help when trouble strikes, Mr. Burrows underscores, adding that he favors rules that force platforms to build in safety from the start.Australia’s formal evaluation, run with Stanford University’s Social Media Lab, will track more than 4,000 young people and their parents for at least two years. Until the results arrive, Mr. Angus urges other governments to resist the rush.“My biggest caution would be not to copy the headline before the evidence is in,” he says. “Otherwise we risk building an elaborate apparatus for determining whether someone is 15 years and 11 months old or 16, without confronting what magically becomes safe about the platform the day they turn 16.”

Australia Readies Lawsuits Against Meta, TikTok and YouTube as Teen Social Media Ban Proves Ineffective

Australia Readies Lawsuits Against Meta, TikTok and YouTube as Teen Social Media Ban Proves Ineffective

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