Australia is set to become the first country to implement a minimum age for social media use on Wednesday, with platforms like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube forced to block more than a million accounts, marking the beginning of an expected global wave of regulation.
From midnight, 10 of the biggest platforms will be required to block Australians aged under 16 or be fined up to A$49.5 million ($33 million). The law received harsh criticism from major technology companies and free speech advocates, but was praised by parents and child advocates.
The rollout closes out a year of speculation about whether a country can block children from using technology that is built into modern life. And it begins a live experiment that will be studied globally by lawmakers who want to intervene directly because they are frustrated by what they say is a tech industry that has been too slow to implement effective harm-minimisation efforts.
Governments from Denmark to Malaysia - and even some states in the U.S., where platforms are rolling back trust and safety features - say they plan similar steps, four years after a leak of internal Meta documents showed the company knew its products contributed to body image problems and suicidal thoughts among teenagers while publicly denying the link existed.
“While Australia is the first to adopt such restrictions, it is unlikely to be the last,” said Tama Leaver, a professor of internet studies at Curtin University.
“Governments around the world are watching how the power of Big Tech was successfully taken on. The social media ban in Australia … is very much the canary in the coal mine.”
A spokesperson for the British government, which in July began forcing websites hosting pornographic content to block under-18 users, said it was “closely monitoring Australia’s approach to age restrictions.”
“When it comes to children’s safety, nothing is off the table,” they added.
Few will scrutinise the impact as closely as the Australians. The eSafety Commissioner, an Australian regulator tasked with enforcing the ban, hired Stanford University and 11 academics to analyse data on thousands of young Australians covered by the ban for at least two years.
