The world’s first national ban on social media for under-16s is faltering at the very first gate, according to the testers who helped Australia’s government design its age-check regime. In a follow-up study first reported by Reuters, the team opened 50 accounts across nine of the 10 platforms covered by the law, declaring the account holder’s age as 16, and not one platform asked for proof.
The finding lands on a scheme that only came into force on 10 December 2025, and it points at a gap regulators had largely overlooked. Much of the debate, and much of our own enforcement coverage, has fixed on the accuracy of photo-based age estimation. The testers say the problem sits earlier, at the initial vetting stage meant to flag likely minors for closer checks.
That stage, which infers a rough age band from a person’s general online activity, does not appear to be catching young users at all. Andrew Hammond, a director at Melbourne testing firm KJR, which ran the government’s original age-assurance trial in 2024 and 2025, put it plainly.
“You should be asked to demonstrate how old you are, and not once have we been asked to verify our age or use age-assurance measures,” he told Reuters.
The 50 test accounts remain active and are spread across Meta’s Instagram and Facebook, Snap’s Snapchat, TikTok, and Alphabet’s YouTube, among others. Only one service, the Australian live-streaming platform Kick, refused to open an account without proof of age.
That is a telling exception, since it shows the check is technically possible when a platform chooses to demand it. The result also echoes the compliance worries that led the regulator to put Meta, TikTok, and YouTube on notice earlier this year.
Australia’s law bars children under 16 from holding accounts on 10 named platforms, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, Twitch, X, YouTube, Kick, and Reddit, and requires companies to take “reasonable steps” to keep them out.
eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, the country’s online safety watchdog, has said platforms stripped millions of under-16 accounts in the run-up to the deadline.
The Act threatens companies that systemically fail to enforce the ban with fines the regulator puts as high as A$54.6m (about $36m), and the government has floated legislation to roughly double that ceiling and let eSafety demand evidence from age-assurance vendors and app stores, not just the platforms. Those expanded powers stalled in the Senate.
KJR’s original trial, which put age-assurance tools in front of more than 1,000 Australians, concluded last year that the technology could work when carefully chosen and implemented.
Yet some advisers cautioned at the time that the exercise never tested real-world circumvention, such as a 14-year-old simply typing in a false birthday.
That caveat now looks prophetic. A separate study reported in late June found more than 85% of Australians aged 12 to 15 were still using social media three months after the ban began, most of them by the oldest trick going, claiming to be over 16.
Regulators elsewhere are watching closely. The EU has been trialling its own age verification app, and the UK, Norway, and others are weighing comparable limits. If the country that went first cannot get past the sign-up screen, the read for everyone drafting behind it is sobering.
eSafety has framed enforcement as a marathon rather than a sprint, and said it is scrutinising the named platforms’ systems for systemic failures rather than one-off slips.
The companies, for their part, say they are steadily building age assurance into the sign-up flow and improving detection over time. On the evidence of 50 accounts that walked straight through, that build is not finished.
