Most Young Australians Successfully Evade the Country's Social Media Ban

The anxious generation is proving more tech savvy than regulators.

Among the great many bogeymen of the current moment is social media, which stands accused of making young people anxious and unhappy. Whatever the merits of those charges—and they're debatable—politicians have predictably tried to address concerns by applying the blunt instrument of coercive law to kids' online activities rather than simply let parents help their children make better choices. The experience in Australia now shows the subjects of the law have, once again, proven cleverer than law enforcers.

Would-Be Internet Regulators Target Troubled Youths

Generation Z is famously more anxious than older generations and subject to increased mental health issues. And never mind that young people have been raised in a chaotic world and were isolated from normal social interactions by public health officials for part of their childhood—the problem must be the online world which they're immersed in.

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt gets much of the credit (or blame) for laying the fault at the door of the internet. The author of the 2024 bestseller The Anxious Generation, Haidt believes digitally focused lives have done harm to young people and calls for restrictions (imposed by parents or government) on minors' use of smartphones and social media.

Perhaps the most enthusiastic embrace of that message is in Australia, where "as of 10 December 2025, age-restricted social media platforms need to take reasonable steps to prevent Australians under the age of 16 from creating or keeping an account," notes the country's eSafety Commissioner. Platforms must implement age verification or face fines of up to 49.5 million Australian dollars ($35.4 million).

But when has a ban or restriction ever gone without significant resistance? Imposing internet-use restrictions on technologically savvy young people was always going to be an uphill battle. The evidence so far suggests that Australia's law has been met with more defiance than compliance.

Young People Are More Tech-Savvy Than Regulators

"There are significant questions about the effectiveness of Australia's social media ban," reports the U.K.'s Molly Rose Foundation, which supports internet restrictions, of the results of a poll of Australian young people. "Three fifths (61%) of 12–15 year-olds who previously held accounts on restricted platforms continue to have access to one or more active accounts."

The group adds that "70% of children still using restricted sites say that it was 'easy' to circumvent the ban. In most cases, social media platforms have failed to detect or seek to remove under 16s accounts."

Importantly, officials agree that young people subject to the law are actively evading its impact. In a compliance update published last month, Australia's eSafety Commissioner, which enforces the ban, conceded that "a substantial proportion of Australian children under the age of 16 continue to retain accounts, create new accounts, or pass platforms' age assurance systems."

Like the Molly Rose Foundation, Australian regulators note that noncompliance is not just a concern for the small platforms with limited exposure in Australia which were expected to become refuges for Australian teens seeking online connections. They also point to large, established companies including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube.

In the majority of cases, according to both reports, young people ignoring the law have not yet been asked to verify their age. But, according to the Molly Rose Foundation, "around a quarter of children still using each restricted platform had been successfully able to get around an age check on a pre-existing account." Some changed their claimed age, others had older friends and relatives set up accounts for them, and still others gamed technology intended to estimate their age by their appearance.

Interestingly, only about one in 20 young Australians report using the easiest workaround: virtual private network (VPN) software that makes them appear to use the internet from outside Australia. That suggests enforcement of the social media ban has been remarkably ineffective.

"This data suggests that, at least in the medium term, an Australia-style ban is unlikely to deliver the improvements in safety that parents and children deserve and demand," concludes the Molly Rose Foundation. "At worst, the Australian ban risks giving parents a false sense of safety."

With Troubled Youngsters, Politicians May Have Reversed Cause and Effect

Of equal concern, it should be noted, is a false sense of fault for the mental health issues suffered by young people. Part of the problem is that researchers worried about social media appear to have decided on a conclusion and then gone looking for supporting evidence.

"Social media has become conceptualized as something almost like a toxin—in that the more of it that teens consume, the more harmful it is to them," Rebecca Etkin of the Yale Child Study Center commented last month. "Most research in the past decade has focused on trying to show this very relationship between more social media use and worse mental health outcomes in teens. But interestingly, studies have generally failed to find support for this relationship."

Etkin doesn't claim that extensive online activity is harmless. She says we don't yet know and that the blame placed on the digital world is not supported by current science.

The authors of a paper published two years ago in the Journal of Pediatrics suggested that excessive social media use might be a symptom rather than a cause. They noted evidence of "declining mental health leading to more social media use rather than the reverse." Their belief was that "a primary cause of the rise in mental disorders is a decline over decades in opportunities for children and teens to play, roam, and engage in other activities independent of direct oversight and control by adults."

To put it bluntly, overprotective adults may have driven kids nuts and caused them to take refuge online.

Covid-era lockdowns contributed to depriving children of the opportunity to independently interact with their peers. In 2022, Pew Research reported concerns among childhood experts that "these disruptions could have lingering effects on young people's mental and emotional well-being." Unable to mingle with friends in person, many unhappy kids were forced into online interaction.

Politicians in Australia and elsewhere claiming to be concerned about young people's mental health would do well to remember that meddling policies and hovering parenting styles probably caused the current crisis. Governments should leave the kids alone. And worried parents could do worse than to occasionally take away phones and send children outside to play, unsupervised.