Three months into Australia’s teen social media ban, the federal government wants to put a head on a spike.
Communications Minister Anika Wells has gone from acknowledging the “meaningful efforts” being taken by social media companies to restrict access for Australians under the age of 16, to pledging to hold them accountable
The government’s sudden about-face reflects the immense pressure that it is under to keep its “world-first” ban from going off the rails.
Despite stepping up the rhetoric, Crikey understands there are no imminent plans to use powers to fine companies up to $49.5 million for the widespread circumvention of the ban by teens, as the tough talk is weighed down by the steady pace of regulatory investigations that will likely be challenged in court.
Meanwhile, internal government documents obtained by Crikey, along with interviews with sources across government, social media companies, parents, educators, civil society groups and teens, suggest the teen social media ban’s honeymoon period has come to an end.
Tensions, even infighting, have broken out between the ban’s enforcers and supporters. The already-strained relationship between the government and tech companies has soured further. The government faces tough challenges in enforcing and evaluating the policy. And the ban is under attack in courtrooms and back rooms, as expensive lobbyists with mystery clients disseminate documents filled with attack lines to journalists covering the policy.
Critics of the ban say their original predictions about why the ban wouldn’t work are already coming true. Defenders say this is a crunch period for a bold new policy that will create generational change. Last week, at the same time that social media companies were handed a massive defeat in US courts, the government rushed in changes to the way the social media ban works in a way some believe is meant to shore up its position in our own courts.
It seems the only thing that everyone agrees on is that Australia’s ban is not going as planned.
The honeymoon period
The high-water mark of the ban so far was the federal government’s announcement in mid-January that social media platforms had removed or deactivated 4.7 million accounts in the first week of the ban.
“The social media minimum age has been in place for one month, and we are already seeing some important progress,” said talking points prepared by the Department of Communications, obtained by a freedom of information request.
It was vindication for the government spruiking an unprecedented policy that, even just weeks before implementation, it wasn’t certain all the major social media platforms would go along with.
Instead, Wells, eSafety commissioner Julie Inman Grant, the department and the Prime Minister’s Office — who had been very involved in the top level of the policy and its roll out — stared down some of the wealthiest, most powerful companies in the world and forced them to heel.
The compliance of the tech companies, which had opposed the ban, was noted. Sources from the social media companies not authorised to speak publicly told Crikey they were ultimately relieved that they had done enough to satisfy the government.
Polling rewarded the government’s resolve. A month into the ban, three-in-five Australians said they believed the ban had been effective so far, with about the same proportion of parents saying they’d observed positive changes in their kids following the ban.
At the same time, many people knew that teens were widely getting around the ban. Dr Jo Orlando, a digital wellbeing researcher at Western Sydney University, said that she would hear from parents and children that kids were still on social media, even if one or two of their accounts were removed.
Early data from a parental monitoring app company Qustodio backed this up. It showed that use of social media by teens among its users had dipped — but only modestly.
“I don’t think you’ll ever get all the kids off,” Orlando said. “What we’re really teaching them is how to get around the rules. And I think that’s really worrying.”
This was no surprise. Forcing tech companies to take meaningful steps to prove users’ ages had long been the dream of online safety advocates, but concerns about the difficulties in enforcing the policy had checked their ambitions.
Even when the Department of Communications commissioned a 2025 trial — which came out with the headline finding that age verification could be done “privately, efficiently and effectively” — the report conceded the significant limitations of technology like facial scans and the ways that kids could get around the technology.
Experts weren’t at all surprised when teens started scanning their parents’ faces or uploading their ID to thwart the ban before it even came into effect.
The government had also been warned of the stakes of failing to enforce the ban. A confidential report given to the government warned that “non-compliance snowballing and becoming normalised” could “undermine the [social media minimum age]’s effectiveness.”
After first implementing the ban, the government had planned out the next phase: tightening the screws on tech companies to stop circumvention.
“The work goes on, obviously we said this would never be perfect and we will continue to do that work to improve these laws,” Wells said during a mid-January press conference.
After first requiring companies to hand over data about how many accounts were removed, eSafety then used new powers to force them to explain how tech companies were stopping teens from finding ways to get back on their platforms, and to root out those users who hadn’t been removed in the first sweeps.
One social media company source explained to Crikey that they were told by eSafety that they could avoid penalties if they could demonstrate their real efforts to restrict under-16s, and that the company was legitimately attempting to continually improve its procedures.
The public and private messaging was in sync: everything was on the right track. Then, something changed
The crackdown
In the past week, Wells’ tone in the media shifted markedly towards highlighting her concern about “reports” of circumvention. The change in talking points came as the initial glowing media coverage in the lead-up to the ban had morphed into a steady drumbeat of critical articles about kids getting around the ban, some from influential international outlets like Bloomberg. One article came from News Corp newspapers — a notable departure given its mastheads had campaigned for the ban and claimed the policy as their own campaign success.
Wells — who was handballed the already legislated, broad-brush outlines of the ban by now-Attorney General Michelle Rowland and set with the task of making it work — is constantly being told that kids are finding a way around the ban, one source close to the communications minister said.
Inman Grant has given her strongest statement yet that her agency is looking to penalise the companies. Appearing on the pro-ban lobby group 36 Months’ podcast earlier this month, the eSafety commissioner spoke about having “ten regulatory investigations” on the go.
There were only ten social media platforms named as being included in the ban by the government (although a few smaller ones have since self-identified). The message was clear: everyone is in the firing line.
This month, eSafety has sent letters to social media platforms with a list of concerns and followed up with meetings about its views on how the companies were complying. The consensus around the industry is that these meetings did “not go well”.
Two sources at companies with social media platforms included in the ban remarked about the shift in tone from eSafety, suggesting that the regulator was no longer happy with how companies were performing and was actively raising the spectre of potential penalties.
On Tuesday, eSafety is set to release a detailed report based on the information obtained from the companies. Crikey understands the federal government is planning on using its pulpit to highlight the failures of the companies in keeping kids off the platforms and, by extension, shame the companies into action. But this won’t be accompanied by any actual fines, Crikey has been told by several government sources.
Multiple industry sources told Crikey they believed that pressure for eSafety to turn the screws was coming from the minister’s office, which, according to one source, has been frustrated with the slow progression of investigation. One prominent pro-ban campaigner even publicly suggested that Inman Grant should step down if the government is not able to stop teens from getting around the ban, suggesting that she is not committed to enforcing the restrictions given her prior ambivalence towards the ban. (Inman Grant’s term, her second as eSafety commissioner, ends in early 2027).
Preparing for a fight
So far, legal hurdles are standing in the way of handing out fines. Under the government’s legislation, eSafety has to convince a court that a company has systematically failed to take “reasonable steps” to enforce age restrictions in order to levy a fine. This is no mean feat.
The government’s own trial documented the limitations of age assurance technologies. It found that facial age scans are least accurate around the 16-year-old cut-off, having an average error of 2-3 years in non-real-world conditions. This means that failure to stop 14-to-15-year-olds from tricking facial scans into letting them onto social media is a feature of a technology that the government has told social media companies to use.
To combat this known limit, eSafety told companies to take other steps to compensate for this known error by constantly assessing users’ ages, rather than a one-time, set-and-forget approach. But these measures weren’t actually tested by the government’s report. In fact, the $6.5 million trial didn’t even conduct a single real-world evaluation of how kids would try to get around the scheme.
Currently, two High Court challenges to the ban hang over plans to enforce it. Last Friday, the government was expected to file its defence to the claim filed by Reddit and libertarian-backed group the Digital Freedom Project that the policy unconstitutionally infringes on Australians’ implied freedom of political expression.
One social media company source mused that any fine against a company would also prompt them to challenge the law’s validity.
Another source with close knowledge of the writing of the ban’s legislation said that its drafting was rushed through unusually quickly and that the government was advised about the real risks of conflict with Australia’s Constitution and its international legal obligations.
Outside of the enforcement, there’s currently another process examining how the teen social media ban is going. ESafety is tracking more than 4,000 young people aged 10 to 16, using a mix of surveys and other data sources, taken from pre- and post-ban, to consider everything from teen wellbeing to how much they use phones and even whether they take Ritalin.
One source who has been closely following the social media ban’s policy remarked that it was odd that eSafety is leading what amounts to an evidence review of the policy. Typically, the regulator enforcing the ban is supposed to be at arm’s length from the formulation of policy. The department is set to run its own review of the ban, two years after it first kicked in.
With the first post-ban so-called “wave” of survey data due soon, the academics appointed to a board advising eSafety’s research have already highlighted concerns about how the ban will expose children to more harm.
According to meeting minutes obtained by Crikey, one group member raised in an August 2025 meeting that kids would no longer have youth-specific safety features on their accounts because they would be using social media in a logged-out state. The meeting’s minutes say that “eSafety is very concerned about this and is engaging with industry about this.” The minutes noted it would be “important for the evaluation to monitor this as a potential unintended consequence.”
The meeting minutes also highlight some stumbles in this study: just 257 young people out of 4,000 included in the study have installed the phone tracking app that would allow researchers to objectively measure how they’re using their phones.
Even more significantly, an eSafety staff member said “unfortunately very few participants” had agreed to sign off on linking sources of data together — for example, phone tracking data with survey results — which limits the value of the information collected.
A member of the academic board, granted anonymity because they had agreed not to speak publicly until the research is published, said this was a fair concern to raise.
The world watches
With both the enforcement and research processes still underway, Tech Policy Design Institute executive director Johanna Weaver said there is currently no evidence about whether the ban is having the intended effect or not.
“Success has to be framed in what harm is being prevented because of this policy, and what harm is this policy causing,” she told Crikey, saying that 4.7 million accounts removed was not proof of anything, one way or another.
Weaver instead positioned the ban as one part of a broader approach: “There is still clear support for — across parliamentarians, across parents, even across children — systemic reform.”
The social media ban is not the government’s only response to children’s safety online. The government has been working away at introducing a digital duty of care, which would impose obligations on platforms to prevent harm rather than just restricting access. Wells told Crikey that her office is working on a suite of reforms that also includes age restrictions on harmful content, AI chatbots and violent games.
But the ban — a policy that Albanese once stridently rejected as being part of his legacy in an interview that led one government member to believe the opposite — looms large over everything else.
Close watchers of the teen social media ban noticed that president of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen said “we are watching closely your world-leading social media ban” when she addressed federal parliament earlier this week. This was a near word-for-word repeat of what she said six months earlier at the UN, suggesting there was little momentum. Whatever they’d seen so far wasn’t enough to change her stance.
Meanwhile, the pace of other countries eagerly following Australia’s lead has slowed. The UK, which was expected to introduce a ban, has instead decided to trial both a ban and a digital curfew with a small number of kids. Others continue to plough ahead, with Indonesia bringing an even stricter ban over the weekend.
And the political pressure shows no sign of letting up. Just this month, lobbying firm C|T Group distributed a dossier of attacks about the teen social media ban to tech journalists.
Titled “100 Days of Failure”, the document is filled with criticism of the ban and the figures behind it — even highlighting Inman Grant’s salary increase.
C|T Group does not list any Australian technology company as a client on the federal lobbyist register. It did not respond to Crikey’s questions about who it was working for when it produced the document.
The end of Australia’s ‘social media ban’
This scrutiny on the ban comes at the same time as big tech’s reputation for youth safety is at its lowest point.
Last week, Meta was found by the courts to have failed to keep children safe from child sexual exploitation and was negligent for designing its platforms in a way that hurts young people’s mental health in two separate cases. YouTube, too, was found guilty of the latter charge. The landmark win in the mental health claim is expected to open the floodgates to hundreds of other claims by others against the companies.
The mental health case narrowly argued that the damage was caused by specific features of the platforms, like the infinite scroll and algorithmic recommendation engines.
On the same day as the Meta and YouTube decision was handed down, Wells announced that the social media ban was being narrowed to only apply to social media platforms that have many of those same features.
“We’re shining a light on these harmful and addictive features being used to target young Australians,” Wells said in a media release.
This isn’t a substantial change in practice; the eSafety commissioner’s enforcement of the ban had focused on major platforms that have those features rather than chasing after every website or app that might technically qualify. But formalising this shift marks a technical but substantive change to Australia’s ban policy.
The new rules could give Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube the opportunity to welcome back their teen users. All they have to do is make versions of their apps without the features deemed unacceptable by the government.
Almost no-one noticed the significant change that Australia has already moved away from having a broad “social media ban” to a more selective restriction on “harmful, addictive features” currently used in most popular social media apps. It’s a move that some in the industry told Crikey they believe is intended to shore up the ban against forthcoming legal challenges.
The government is asking for patience. Wells told Crikey last week that “cultural change will take time”. But between a government itching to prove its willingness to keep standing up to big tech, the dizzying pace of change in tech making regulation like hitting a moving target, and reforming the ban on the fly, no-one seems like they’re in a mood to wait and see.
Teens aren’t waiting, either. Broken Hill-based teen Abbie Jane says none of her friends who are aged under 16 have been stopped by the ban — “I know ten-year-olds who are still using TikTok!” — and that kids have simply made new accounts even when they’ve been caught.
Jane believes that many of the parents who think their kids have deleted their accounts are now completely in the dark about what their sons and daughters are doing online.
“In the end, I’m not sure the ban has made young people safer — it may have simply made the problem harder for adults to see,” she said.
