Since Australia barred under-16s from using social media in late 2025, more than two dozen countries have either enacted their own bans or are weighing similar restrictions.
They include a number of European states as well as developing nations such as Indonesia, Vietnam and Brazil. While US President Donald Trump’s administration appears unlikely to follow suit, several states including California are getting serious about potential regulations to limit young people’s use of social media.
Proponents say the moves signal a fundamental shift in favor of scrolling-free childhoods. But there are already questions over the effectiveness of the Australian ban. Tech giants, including Meta Platforms Inc. and Snap Inc., have been accused of failing to properly enforce it on their platforms. And many teenagers appear to be finding ways around it.
Why are there calls to ban kids from social media?
Concerns around the effects on children of excessive social media use have grown in recent years as medical professionals sought to explain an increase in mental health problems reported among the young, especially in high-income Western nations.
US lawsuits filed in recent years claimed that by engineering their platforms to be hard to resist, social media companies have caused young users serious harm. Academic studies have indicated that excessive screen time can hold back a child’s development. Over-exposure to fast-moving digital media can make it harder for children to focus on slow, quiet tasks. And too much time spent alone on a smartphone deprives children of the human interactions experts say they need to become confident adults who can navigate working life and form healthy, durable relationships. Social media has also been linked to cases of rampant bullying, sexual abuse and extortion that have led to self-harm and suicide.
In his 2024 bestseller The Anxious Generation, US psychologist Jonathan Haidt linked increases in teen mental illness that began around 2012 to a societal shift from a healthy “play-based childhood” in the real world to an addictive “phone-based childhood.”
The book played a role in precipitating Australia’s ban, and several leaders, notably France’s Emmanuel Macron and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, have commissioned expert reports to look further into the matter.
The tech firms that own the social media services say they are committed to users’ safety and often point to features they have implemented over the years to protect teens.
Does using social media less make kids happier?
There is conflicting evidence related to the use of social media and children’s mental well-being. Academics debate the extent to which an increase in psychological problems observed in young people in several countries is caused by them spending more time online or other factors, such as pressure for academic success and a growing awareness and reporting of mental health issues.
Some researchers say that social networks have become an important aspect of children’s social lives. A recent survey of around 30,000 European children carried out by the London School of Economics concluded that “the findings do not support a simple interpretation that access to social media is either clearly safe or clearly harmful.”
How does the Australian ban work?
The Australian legislation requires operators of platforms including TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, Facebook and X to take reasonable steps to keep under-16s off their services. They must deactivate or restrict access to accounts for underage users, and many are using technological systems to verify ages.
There are three methods that they typically use: The first, age verification, involves users providing a document proving their age; the second, age estimation, uses biometric data, such as a face, voice or other traits; the third, age inference, looks at online behavior such as browsing history, friendship networks or word choice to try to determine age.
What are other countries doing?
Measures implemented or being discussed by governments range from outright bans to mandating parental consent for children to access social media and barring the algorithmic profiling of younger users by social media companies to target them with personalized content.
The UK government in June announced a “full ban” on under-16s using social media, with additional midnight curfews and a proposal to end features such as auto-playing videos and personalized content for children. While the government has said the ban — which it aims to implement in the spring of 2027 — will follow Australia’s model, it’s still not entirely clear how the restrictions would be enforced. As with the Australian ban, the UK measures are not expected to cover messaging apps such as WhatsApp or educational platforms such as Google Classroom.
In July, France became the first European Union nation to pass a law banning young people from social media. The measure is due to kick in from January 2027. Since in most cases EU law allows only the European Commission to impose fines on platforms with more than 45 million users, the French legislation is designed to dovetail with the bloc’s Digital Services Act that makes social media companies responsible for removing any illegal material from their sites. In France, this will now include any interaction by under-15s on the platforms. The DSA allows the EU and national governments to hit non-compliant platforms with fines of as much as 6% of a provider’s global annual turnover.
The European Commission is also looking at various measures that, for now, would stop short of an outright, continent-wide ban on children using social media. Commission President von der Leyen plans to propose new rules that would require a responsible adult to supervise any child under 13 accessing the platforms and would institute a total ban on screentime for children under the age of three. Access for older teens would be made conditional on social media companies implementing certain safety measures. Some of the new safety requirements are tipped to be included in a forthcoming “Digital Fairness Act.”
The US government has taken issue with the UK’s plans, with the White House saying a ban would impose “disproportionate compliance burdens on American companies” and would probably be ineffective at keeping young teens off the platforms.
Is the Australian ban working?
The government said in January that about 5 million underage accounts had been shut in the weeks after the ban took effect. A poll in March showed three in five adults thought the ban had been effective.
However, subsequent research suggested a more nuanced picture. An April survey of more than 700 Australian teens found that just one in four between the ages of 14 and 15 were staying off social media. About 70% of parents who said their child had social media accounts before the ban still had one, according to the regulator. Some children reported that they hadn’t encountered any age checks. Others borrowed adult accounts or resorted to using virtual private networks (VPNs) — tools that conceal one’s location to circumvent country-specific restrictions.
In June, the government accused the social media companies of failing to do enough to comply with the ban. It pledged to double the maximum penalty for violations to A$99 million ($69 million) from A$49.5 million and to give the country’s online safety watchdog extra enforcement powers. So far, no social media platform has been fined for breaching the ban.
A report published in late July by Australia’s online safety regulator showed the proportion of under-16s who reported using a social media platform in March was 81.5%. That compares with 85.9% before the law took effect in December.
Backers of minimum age rules for social media say full compliance in Australia was always unlikely, that parents there widely support the ban, and that its success should be judged over the long term.
How are the UK and others learning from Australia’s experience?
The UK and French governments have said they will choose and enforce the most effective age-verification methods, rather than leaving that aspect to the companies to decide. They have asked national regulators to work out the most appropriate age-assurance systems. The EU has even unveiled its own age-verification app in an attempt to set a standard for the continent.
According to the BBC, the UK government under former prime minister Keir Starmer was considering restricting VPN usage by certain age groups. It’s unclear whether the idea will be picked up by his successor, Andy Burnham. Experts from the European Parliament’s internal Think Tank have pointed out how VPNs create a loophole in the implementation of systems to protect children online, but the commission is not planning for now to regulate VPN usage.
Disclaimer: This report is auto generated from the Bloomberg news service. ThePrint holds no responsibility for its content.