Why Australia's Teen Social Media Ban Isn't Working the Way Lawmakers Hoped

Australia's ban on social media for children under 16 has been in effect since late 2024, but new research suggests it's only partly doing what legislators intended. A Molly Rose Foundation briefing from April 2026 found that while teenagers are spending somewhat less time on these platforms, most of them still maintain active accounts in violation of the rule.

Put simply: the law has created friction—it's making social media harder to access for under-16s—but it hasn't eliminated access. That gap between what the law aims to do and what's actually happening on the ground is the core problem researchers identified.

How the Ban Works (and Why It's Incomplete)

When Australia passed this law, its designers made a deliberate choice: they placed responsibility for enforcement on the platforms themselves—Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube—rather than on parents or children. This reflected a practical reality: age-verification technology isn't reliable enough to work perfectly, and governments usually hesitate to penalize kids directly. So the platforms had to implement systems to prevent under-16s from creating or maintaining accounts.

The Molly Rose Foundation's research suggests those systems haven't worked as intended. The foundation had previously submitted similar findings to UK Parliament in February 2026, where it noted that enforcement hadn't led to widespread account deletion—a sign that the rule was being circumvented.

What the Research Actually Found

The April briefing drew on children's own accounts of their experiences, which comes with a standard limitation: kids may not remember accurately, or may answer differently depending on who's asking. Still, the main finding held steady—teens reported spending less time overall on these platforms while keeping their accounts active. That pattern suggests the ban is like a speed bump: it slows heavy use without stopping people from accessing the platforms at all.

The wellbeing results were mixed. Some teenagers reported feeling better; others didn't. The research didn't find a clear answer in either direction. That actually matters for policymakers, because it means evidence from Australia won't cleanly settle whether age-based bans help or hurt young people.

The Larger Safety Problem Underneath

This research lives within a broader context. The Molly Rose Foundation's wider work has shown that social media algorithms actively promote content about suicide and self-harm to vulnerable teenagers. That finding changes how we should read the Australia results. If a ban reduces time spent on platforms with known safety failures, it may protect kids even if account numbers don't drop.

The platforms themselves have problems on their side too. A Reuters investigation from September 2025 found that Instagram's safety tools have major flaws. For example, one feature was supposed to redirect teens away from self-harm content—but in testing, it never actually worked. A coalition of researchers, including the Molly Rose Foundation, examined 47 of Instagram's safety features and raised serious concerns. Meta disputed how the report characterized its teen safety efforts, though the company didn't detail its objections to the specific feature findings.

There's a credibility gap here. Meta publicly commits to teen safety, but its own tools don't seem to perform as promised. That matters directly for Australia's enforcement question: if the safety systems platforms are legally required to use don't work reliably, compliance numbers will hide the true amount of teen exposure to harmful content.

Why This Matters for Other Countries

The UK is paying close attention. The country's government ran a public consultation called "Growing up in the online world," which closed in June 2026, and heard from the Molly Rose Foundation and other researchers about the dangers of unrestricted social media access for kids. Australia's experience is serving as a test case—but the new research suggests the test hasn't produced a clear answer yet.

The core empirical question that policy conversations keep circling back to remains unresolved: does platform access itself cause harm to young people, or do kids who are already struggling tend to spend more time online and experience worse outcomes for other reasons? The Australia data offers something new—real-world evidence of whether bans actually change behavior, rather than just another study showing that heavy use correlates with poor wellbeing.

That answer, so far, is cautious: bans do reduce time spent online, but they leave the underlying infrastructure—the accounts themselves—essentially untouched.