Australia has announced it will double the maximum penalty for social media companies breaking its minimum age law, from 49.5 million to 99 million AUD, equivalent to more than $68 million, after becoming the first country in the world to implement a social media ban for those under 16. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said it is clear that big tech companies are not doing enough to comply with the law, and that the changes reflect the seriousness with which the government takes any failure by social media companies to comply with its world-leading legislation.
Along with the new penalty threshold, the Australian government is granting its eSafety Commissioner Julie Grant more enforcement power, with the commissioner now able to demand social media companies provide evidence of how they are stopping children under 16 years old from starting an account. Notably, the Australian agency can gather evidence regarding compliance with the ban from third parties including age verification providers and app store companies. The country’s online safety agency also confirmed it is still actively investigating potential non-compliance with Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube.
While the government said it has already seen more than five million under-16 accounts removed, deactivated, or restricted since the ban went into effect in December, recent studies and polls have raised questions about the law’s effectiveness. In April, a charity organisation called the Molly Rose Foundation found that 61 percent of more than 1,000 children polled between 12 and 15 years old still had access to social media. More recently, the University of Newcastle published a study claiming that more than 85 percent of Australian teens under 16 are still on social media applications.
The Australian government’s decision to double the financial penalties rather than fundamentally rethink the enforcement architecture of the ban reflects a commitment to the policy direction even in the face of evidence that platform-level compliance has been insufficient to prevent determined young users from accessing social media. The gap between the five million accounts removed and the 85 percent of teens still on social media suggests that account removal is not translating into meaningful reduction in access, either because users are creating new accounts, accessing platforms through other means, or because the removed accounts represent a subset of users who were more easily identifiable rather than the broader population of underage users. For policymakers globally who are watching Australia’s experience as a reference point for their own potential age restriction laws, the combination of escalating penalties and expanded third-party evidence-gathering powers signals the direction that enforcement is likely to take in markets where platform self-compliance proves inadequate.
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