Australia will double the maximum penalty for social media companies that fail to comply with its under-16 ban to 99 million AUD, as the Albanese government moves to tighten enforcement against platforms it says are not doing enough to keep children off their services.
The government will also introduce legislation to expand the powers of the eSafety Commissioner, allowing the regulator to compel platforms and third parties, including age-assurance and app-store providers, to produce information and documents to verify compliance with the law. The maximum penalty for failing to comply with the Commissioner’s information-gathering notices will also double.
Commenting on the decision, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said it was “clear big tech are not doing enough to comply with the law” and that “there are still too many children on social media”. Communications Minister Anika Wells said she was “not satisfied that tech companies are doing everything they can to keep under-16s off their platforms” and added that the government would give the regulator “stronger tools to get the job done” while doubling penalties for non-compliance.
Australia’s social media minimum-age law, which prohibits children under 16 from having accounts on designated platforms, was enacted in late 2024 and took effect in December 2025. The legislation has since been replicated globally, with several countries exploring or enacting similar restrictions. In India, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Goa are considering age-based social media restrictions, while the union government has indicated it is examining a three-tier graded regulatory framework for children’s access to online platforms.
What Australia’s first compliance report said:
- Five platforms under investigation: The eSafety Commissioner is investigating Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube, with decisions on possible enforcement action expected by mid-2026, according to their first compliance report on the ban released in March 2026.
- Multiple compliance concerns: The regulator observed platforms prompting under-16 users to re-verify their age, permitting repeated age-verification attempts, maintaining ineffective reporting systems for parents, and relying heavily on self-declared age instead of robust age assurance.
- Systems under scrutiny: However, the Commissioner said the presence of under-16 users alone does not establish non-compliance. Instead, it will assess whether platforms implemented “reasonable steps” and effective safeguards that prevent children from circumventing restrictions.
- Reactive compliance: Although some platforms improved reporting mechanisms and limited repeated verification attempts following regulatory engagement, the report suggests these changes were largely reactive.
- Harm persists: Crucially, the Commissioner reported no discernible decline in cyberbullying and image-based abuse complaints involving under-16 users since the ban took effect.
Implementing age verification at scale: At a MediaNama roundtable on age verification and restricting children’s access to social media, experts disagreed on whether age verification can be implemented effectively at scale. “Any technical measure is capable of circumvention,” one speaker said, while another argued it is “extremely hard, pretty much impossible, to implement age verification in hardware or software without circumvention”.
Participants also questioned facial age estimation after one speaker cited an incident where “someone put up a Barbie doll instead of their own face, and the AI guessed their age as 102”. Another speaker said, “I would not be comfortable with any company or government running facial recognition on my child,” arguing that resilience against online harms should take precedence over intrusive verification.
In the Indian context, speakers said India’s shared-device ecosystem presents an additional challenge. One participant observed that “every child basically knows how to use their parents’ phones”, meaning age checks often verify the parent rather than the child because “it’s the parent’s ID that’s going into their age-based check”. Nikhil Pahwa, MediaNama founder and editor-in-chief, also warned against treating verification as a neutral technical fix, noting, “To verify who’s a child, they’ll have to verify everyone who’s using a service. Once that verification mechanism comes in, it will be used for everything.”
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