Australia's under-16 social media ban was already the strictest of its kind anywhere. On June 28, 2026, the government made it stricter still: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Communications Minister Anika Wells announced the maximum civil penalty for systemic breaches of the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024 would double, from A$49.5 million to A$99 million, while giving the eSafety Commissioner new power to compel platforms, age-assurance vendors, and app stores to hand over evidence of what they've actually done to keep children off their services (Prime Minister of Australia).
What actually changed
The minimum-age obligation took effect on December 10, 2025, requiring platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube to take "reasonable steps" to prevent Australians under 16 from holding accounts (eSafety Commissioner). The government says more than 5 million under-16 accounts have since been removed, deactivated or restricted. But it also now concedes that isn't the same as the law working. "I'm heartened by the shift in conversation and the global momentum we've seen since introducing the social media minimum age, but it's clear big tech are not doing enough," Albanese said in the June 28 release. Wells was blunter: platforms are "doing the bare minimum."
The trigger was a study published in The BMJ on June 24, 2026, by University of Newcastle researchers who surveyed 408 adolescents aged 12–16 in New South Wales before and three months after the ban took effect. More than 85% of under-16 respondents were still using restricted platforms at follow-up, most through their own accounts; two-thirds reported encountering an age check, and a meaningful minority got around one anyway — via fake accounts (15–19%), borrowed accounts, or private browsing (6–11%) (BMJ Group). The researchers flagged real limits on their own data — a small, single-state, self-reported sample — but the headline number landed hard in Canberra anyway.
The steelman
The case for a harder line isn't frivolous. If a platform's age-assurance system is trivially defeated by a false birthdate or a passable selfie, a A$49.5 million ceiling on a company with tens of billions in global revenue is a rounding error, not a deterrent — and the point of the underlying law, protecting young adolescents from documented harms tied to heavy social media use, doesn't survive contact with an unenforced statute. Giving the regulator the ability to demand proof of compliance, rather than take platform self-attestation on faith, is a defensible fix to a genuine transparency gap. Reasonable people can support a minimum-age framework in principle while still wanting to know whether it's actually reducing exposure.
The gap the fine doesn't close
The trouble is that the penalty increase treats the BMJ findings as a pricing problem when Australia's own reporting suggests it's an enforcement problem. As AAP reported the same week, no penalty — not one — has been issued against any platform since the law took effect six months earlier (AAP News). University of Sydney media lecturer Catherine Page Jeffery put it plainly to AAP: "The eSafety Commissioner does need to move into enforcement mode and crack down." Doubling a ceiling nobody has approached yet is a message, not a mechanism. If eSafety hasn't built the caseload to use a A$49.5 million stick, there's no obvious reason a A$99 million one changes platform behavior on its own — it changes headlines.
The expanded documentation powers deserve more scrutiny than they're getting. Compelling age-assurance vendors and app stores, not just platforms, to produce compliance evidence widens the number of commercial entities legally on the hook to demonstrate how they infer or verify a user's age — which in practice means widening who collects, stores, and can be compelled to disclose age-signal data on Australian teenagers. The original 2024 Act's political selling point was that no Australian would be forced to hand over government ID to use social media. That promise was about the method of verification. It says nothing about the audit trail now required to prove the method worked, which is a second, quieter site of data accumulation the government hasn't fully reckoned with in public.
The verdict
Canberra is responding to real evidence with a real signal, and the political incentive to look tough on child safety after an 85% non-compliance headline is understandable. But a regulator that has never used its existing enforcement authority gains little by being handed a bigger number it may just as easily decline to use. eSafety's credibility problem right now is a track record problem, not a statutory ceiling problem — and the documentation powers, however well-intentioned, risk solving platform opacity by creating third-party opacity instead. If Australia wants proof its law works, the fastest path is issuing the first fine under the rules it already has, not writing a bigger one it may never reach for either.