Australia will become the first country to ban social media accounts for users under 16 starting 10 December, with regulators tracking “migratory patterns” to stop teens shifting to other platforms, Communications Minister Anika Wells said on Wednesday (3 December).
The ban is designed to tackle what Wells described as “behavioural cocaine” — addictive design features targeting young users — and shifts responsibility for underage use onto tech companies.
Australia’s eSafety Commission will begin compliance checks on 11 December, sending notices to 10 major platforms requesting data on underage accounts both before and after the ban.
Wells emphasised the law will be monitored through an evidence-based review over two years, noting it is not “set and forget.”
She criticised platforms like YouTube for always being “at pains to remind us all how unsafe their platform is in a logged-out state.”
“Viewers must now be 16 or older to sign in to YouTube. This law will not achieve its goal of making children safer online and will, in fact, make Australian kids less safe on YouTube,” the platform said in a statement earlier, on Wednesday (3 December), complying with the new law.
"Teenage addiction was not a bug, it was a design feature,” Wells said, acknowledging teens may experience short-term discomfort losing access to accounts.
“But I truly believe the long-term benefits will outweigh the withdrawal symptoms,” she concluded.
The law bars users under 16 from maintaining social media accounts and carries penalties of up to A$49.5 million (£25.5 million) for breaches.
Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat have all pledged to comply, while Elon Musk’s X and Reddit have yet to make public commitments.
Australia’s eSafety Commission reports that YouTube has about 325,000 accounts for users aged 13 to 15, compared with Snapchat’s 440,000 and Instagram’s 350,000.
The watchdog also found that over a third of Australians aged 10 to 15 have come across harmful content on YouTube, the highest rate among major platforms.
Peace is Armenia’s only reliable guarantee of security, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has said in comments in Dublin, where he also...
Hungarian authorities have recovered nearly $20 million in cash hidden in buildings and buried in forests as part of a bribery investigation into M...
U.S. President Donald Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping are set to hold a historic trilateral meeting in She...
Iran’s Assembly of Experts has backed withdrawing from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and overhauling the country’s defence doctrine, calling both steps essential to national security and deterrence.
President Vladimir Putin agreed on Thursday to let European representatives join the next round of Ukraine peace talks while the United States continues to work towards what could become the largest prisoner exchange of the Russia-Ukraine war.
Microsoft struggled to restore its services on Friday after a major outage disrupted Outlook, Teams and Copilot across the United States and Asia-Pacific region.
Here's your AnewZ Technology Daily Brief for the 13th of November. This week, a Microsoft outage hit Australian agencies, Google restricted mapping data in South Korea, a lawsuit targeted advanced AI development, and Nvidia faced a leadership crisis after Jensen Huang's resignation.
Kazakhstan-linked hackers stole thousands of national security documents from Tajikistan, a cybersecurity company has said.
Hungarian authorities have recovered nearly $20 million in cash hidden in buildings and buried in forests as part of a bribery investigation into Miklós Seszták, a former minister under ex-Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
U.S. President Donald Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping are set to hold a historic trilateral meeting in Shenzhen on 19 November. The White House says the talks will focus on nuclear arms reductions, with Iran also on the agenda.
U.S. negotiators floated the idea of Ukraine withdrawing from the eastern Donbas region in exchange for NATO membership, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said.
China is taking its space technology ambitions beyond its borders, with a major deal to build a network of 20 artificial intelligence-powered satellites for Oman.
Europe will send a team of diplomats to Ukraine peace talks rather than a single envoy, EU leaders agreed on Friday at the end of a summit in Dublin.
You can download the AnewZ application from Play Store and the App Store.
What is your opinion on this topic?
Leave the first comment