Australia has raised the maximum penalty for social media companies that fail to keep under-16s off their platforms from AUD $49.5 million to AUD $99 million, according to reporting published on 27 June 2026.

The increase targets systematic failures — patterns of non-compliance — rather than isolated underage accounts that slip through. A single kid creating a TikTok account without detection is operationally different from a platform that has plainly failed to build or enforce age-verification systems at any meaningful scale. That distinction shapes how regulators measure breach versus isolated incident.

The Legislative Foundation

The framework underpinning this is the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024, which Parliament passed in November 2024. It amends the Online Safety Act 2021 and sets 16 as the legal minimum age for social media account holders in Australia — among the most prescriptive thresholds any country has enacted to date. The eSafety Commissioner, a regulatory body created under Australian law, holds authority to enforce the scheme and seek court-ordered fines against platforms that breach it.

The old penalty ceiling was set at 150,000 penalty units, which translates to roughly AUD $49.5 million. The new ceiling of AUD $99 million makes Australia's maximum sanction for age-restriction failures substantially higher than most comparable countries currently impose for the same offences. The EU's Digital Services Act, by contrast, allows penalties calculated as a percentage of global revenue — a fundamentally different model that can yield far larger numbers for the largest platforms, but Australia's fixed ceiling is now more severe than fixed-penalty regimes elsewhere.

What Changes in Enforcement

The eSafety Commissioner remains the enforcement body, and the new penalty does not change what counts as a breach. What shifts is the upper financial exposure for platforms found to have systematically failed. For Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube, AUD $99 million is material but not fatal. The deterrence logic here is cumulative: regulators in Australia and globally are signalling that fines will climb until the economics of non-compliance become worse than the economics of fixing it.

A broader pattern is visible across multiple jurisdictions. Regulators typically begin with modest penalties, enforcement then reveals how little those penalties change platform behaviour, and the ceiling gets raised. Australia is moving through that cycle faster than most countries have done.

Age verification remains the hardest part technically. Confirming a user's age reliably — without building a surveillance system or forcing excessive data collection — is still an unsolved technical problem in practice. The law targets systematic failures, but proving what counts as systematic when platforms process hundreds of millions of account creations per year will require the eSafety Commissioner to establish clear standards in any enforcement action.

Australia has staked itself as one of the more aggressive jurisdictions globally on child safety online, and this penalty increase extends that position into measurable terms. Whether it actually pushes platforms to invest more heavily in age assurance technology depends on whether the eSafety Commissioner actually pursues enforcement actions. Laws and enforcement are not the same thing. The gap between them is where compliance decisions get made inside tech companies.

The penalty increase is now law. The meaningful next step is whether the eSafety Commissioner acts to test it in court.