Seven months after Australia's Social Media Minimum Age Act became the world's first blanket ban on under-16 social media accounts, the government has a peer-reviewed answer to whether it worked: mostly, no. A study published by BMJ found that more than 85% of under-16 participants were still using restricted platforms three months after the ban took effect on December 10, 2025. Researchers surveyed 408 Australian adolescents aged 12 to 17 before and after the law's start date, and found daily use among 12-13 year-olds essentially unchanged, while it fell only modestly for 14-15 year-olds — a drop that may simply reflect displacement into private browsers and fake accounts rather than genuine disengagement.
Steelmanning the Ban
The case for the law is not frivolous. Algorithmic feeds, engagement-optimized design, and well-documented links between heavy adolescent social media use and anxiety, sleep disruption, and body-image harm gave the Albanese government a real mandate to act, and more than five million under-16 accounts have in fact been removed, deactivated, or restricted since the ban began, according to the Prime Minister's office. A government facing sustained parental and public pressure to do something about platform harms to children has a legitimate interest in setting a floor. Proportionate regulation does not mean no regulation.
But proportionality also means asking whether the chosen mechanism actually achieves the stated goal, and here the BMJ evidence is hard to wave away. Two-thirds of surveyed teens reported encountering an age-verification check, most often nothing more rigorous than self-declaring their age or uploading a selfie. Circumvention was correspondingly easy: 15-19% of respondents said they used a fake account, and 6-11% simply switched to a private browsing window. Most under-16 users who stayed on platforms did so through personal accounts they had opened themselves before or in defiance of the ban.
Escalation as the Default Response
Rather than revisit the verification mechanism, Canberra has chosen escalation. On June 28, 2026, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced the maximum penalty for systemic non-compliance would double from A$49.5 million to A$99 million, bringing it in line with Australia's competition and consumer law penalty ceiling. The government will also give the eSafety Commissioner new powers to compel documents and evidence not just from platforms but from third parties such as age-assurance vendors and app stores. Albanese put it bluntly: "It's clear that big tech are not doing enough to comply with the law." Communications Minister Anika Wells was blunter still, saying platforms were "doing the bare minimum to get by." Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube are all currently under eSafety investigation for potential non-compliance.
The BMJ researchers' own conclusion was more measured than the government's rhetoric: there is "insufficient evidence" the ban has meaningfully reduced adolescent social media use, three months in.
That gap — between a regulator promising "world-leading powers" and researchers finding a policy that has barely moved the needle — is the story. Doubling a fine does not fix a verification system that a 14-year-old can defeat with a stock photo or an incognito tab. If anything, pushing platforms toward stricter, more invasive checks to avoid a A$99 million fine risks the opposite of child safety: teenagers who previously used their own, monitorable accounts get funneled toward fake or borrowed-identity accounts that carry none of the safety tooling (reporting, content filters, parental controls) the ban was meant to preserve. A prohibition that displaces rather than reduces demand can leave the target population less protected, not more.
The Legal Challenge Cuts a Different Way
Reddit's High Court challenge, filed December 12, 2025, does not primarily argue the ban is ineffective — it argues the ban is unconstitutional, on the ground that it burdens Australia's implied freedom of political communication by locking under-16s out of a platform Reddit characterizes as a knowledge-sharing forum rather than conventional social media. Reddit also notes that compliance forces "intrusive and potentially insecure verification processes on adults as well as minors" — a cost the BMJ data suggests is being paid for strikingly little benefit. Whatever the High Court decides on the constitutional question, the practical point stands on its own: a verification regime porous enough for two-thirds of surveyed teens to route around it still requires every adult Australian user to prove their age to use the service at all.
What Proportionate Regulation Would Look Like
A regulator serious about both child safety and proportionality would treat the BMJ findings as a signal to redesign the mechanism — investing in interoperable, privacy-preserving age-assurance standards, or shifting toward platform design obligations (default privacy settings, algorithmic feed limits, reporting tools) that work regardless of whether age is verified — rather than simply raising the price of non-compliance with a check that doesn't check much. Escalating fines on platforms for failing to enforce an easily-defeated rule is a policy that looks tough without being effective, and it is Australian teenagers, parents, and the broader case for evidence-based tech regulation who pay the cost of that gap.