The Under-16 Social Media Ban: What Changed at Home, and What Did Not

Ten months after Australia’s minimum age for social media came into force, the question most parents are asked, and most often ask one another, is whether the ban has worked. It is a reasonable question, and it is not one this article will answer. A reliable verdict on outcomes would require data that has not been published in a form that supports one, and a verdict without that data would be opinion presented as fact.

There is a second question, narrower and more useful, which does have a reliable answer. What does the law require, of whom, and what does it leave untouched? That question matters more to a household than the first, because it marks the line between what the platforms must now do and what remains the family’s own decision. This article sets out that line, drawing on information published by the eSafety Commissioner and read on 17 October 2026.

It is not a political piece and takes no position on whether the law is good policy. It describes what the law does.

What the law requires

Since 10 December 2025, platforms that fall within the definition of an age-restricted social media platform have been required to take reasonable steps to prevent Australians under the age of 16 from creating or keeping an account. That is the obligation in its entirety, and its shape deserves attention.

The obligation sits on the platform. It does not sit on the child, and it does not sit on the parent. A platform that fails to take reasonable steps is the party exposed to enforcement. The law does not require a parent to monitor, report or prevent anything, and it does not make it an offence for a young person to hold an account.

The obligation also concerns accounts rather than content. The law is directed at the creation and keeping of accounts by under-16s, which is a narrower thing than access to a service, as the sections below explain.

Which services are covered depends on the criteria set out in the legislation. According to eSafety, a service falls within scope where it has a recommender feature, a logged-in feature, or both, unless it has been excluded by the Minister’s Rules. Those rules were made in July 2025 and amended in March 2026. The criteria are applied by eSafety in forming its views about particular platforms.

Who is covered

eSafety publishes its views on which platforms are and are not age-restricted. The lists below reflect those views as at 21 November 2025, which eSafety reaffirmed in March 2026.

Two points about the table should be stated, because it is easily misread.

The first is that eSafety itself says the lists can change. A platform may add or remove features, a new service may appear, or the rules may be amended again. A household that relies on the table should check eSafety’s current list from time to time rather than treating this one as permanent.

The second is that the right-hand column is not a list of services that eSafety considers safe or suitable for children. It is a list of services that, in eSafety’s view, fall outside the age-restriction obligation. Whether a particular child should use any of them is a separate question, and the law does not answer it.

What under-16s can still do

This is the part of the law that most directly affects what happens at home, and it is the part most often misunderstood.

According to eSafety, young people under 16 can still view publicly available content on many platforms without logging in to an account. That includes most YouTube videos. A child without an account can, in many cases, still watch the same material that a child with an account would have watched; what they lose is the account itself, with the features that come with it.

eSafety also states that messaging and online gaming platforms are mostly not age-restricted. The right-hand column of the table reflects this: Messenger, WhatsApp and Discord for messaging, Roblox and Steam for gaming, all outside the obligation in eSafety’s current view.

The consequence for a household follows directly and should be stated plainly. The law has addressed one part of a young person’s online life, the holding of accounts on a defined group of platforms. It has not addressed the rest. Logged-out viewing remains open. Messaging remains open. Gaming, with the chat functions that many games carry, remains open. For a family, those areas still require a household rule, because the law does not supply one.

Gaming deserves particular mention, because it is the area in which the household’s own decisions, about hardware, placement and chat settings, carry the most weight once the law has stepped back. A family weighing up a gaming setup at home may find our breakdown of what a gaming PC costs in Australia useful, not least because the decision about where the machine sits in the house is also a decision about supervision.

Penalties, and on whom

The enforcement provisions confirm where the obligation lies.

According to eSafety, there are no penalties for under-16s who hold or create an account on an age-restricted platform, and no penalties for their parents or carers. A family in which a child has kept an account has not committed an offence.

The penalties apply to platforms. A platform that fails to take reasonable steps to prevent under-16s from having accounts can face court-imposed civil penalties of up to 300,000 penalty units for a corporation. eSafety states that this amounts, at present, to $109.2 million. That figure is tied to the value of a penalty unit and may change when that value is revised.

The distinction has a practical implication. A parent who discovers that a child has found a way around an age check is not in breach of anything, and need not treat the discovery as a legal matter. It remains a household matter, to be handled in the way the household handles any other rule.

Age checks, and the scam that came with them

To meet the obligation, platforms check the age of account holders, and eSafety notes that different platforms use different methods. A household with several children on several services may therefore encounter several different processes, and some of them will ask for more information than others.

eSafety has also warned that scammers send fake age-verification requests, designed to look as though they come from a platform. The advice is straightforward and applies to every member of the household, adults included. Do not click links in messages that ask you to verify an age. Go instead to the platform’s own Help section, through the app or the official website, and confirm there whether any check is genuinely required.

A second piece of practical advice from eSafety concerns young people who are about to lose an account. eSafety suggests downloading any data the young person wishes to keep, such as photographs, messages and contacts, before the account is deactivated or removed. A child who has used an account for several years may hold a good deal of material on it, and it is considerably easier to save that material in advance than to recover it afterwards.

What the parent threads report

Parents discussing the ban online describe a mixed picture, and their accounts are worth recording as reported experience, while being clear that they are not data.

Some parents report that friends of their children who already had accounts still have them. Others report that children who lost an account obtained a new one shortly afterwards. Still others report that little has changed in their own household, often because their children were not heavy users of the restricted platforms in the first place and spend most of their time on video, messaging or games, all of which, as set out above, sit largely outside the law.

None of these accounts can be generalised. A comment thread is a self-selected group of people who chose to write about the topic, and it says nothing reliable about the population as a whole.

eSafety published a compliance report in March 2026, and that report informs its approach to enforcement. This article does not characterise the report’s findings, because doing so accurately would require a closer reading than a summary allows. Readers who wish to understand how the regulator assesses platform compliance should consult the report itself on the eSafety website.

The review

The law includes a mechanism for its own assessment. According to eSafety, the Minister must commence an independent review of the minimum age provisions within two years of 10 December 2025, which is to say by December 2027.

That review is the point at which the question this article declined to answer, whether the law has worked, will receive a formal examination. Until then, any confident answer in either direction should be treated with caution.

Where the law stops and the household starts

The law has made a defined group of platforms responsible for keeping under-16s off their accounts. It has not made any decision about the rest of a young person’s online life, and three decisions in particular remain with the household.

Messaging apps. Messenger, WhatsApp and Discord sit outside the obligation in eSafety’s current view. Whether a child uses them, with whom and at what age, is the family’s decision.

Gaming chat. Many games, including those on Roblox and Steam, carry chat functions that connect players with people they may not know. The law does not restrict them. Whether chat is enabled, and with whom, is a household setting.

Logged-out video. Most YouTube videos, among other public content, remain viewable without an account. The removal of an account does not remove access to the material, and the household’s own rules about viewing time and content still apply.

A family that has settled those three questions has addressed the parts of the online world that the law deliberately left open. A family that has not may find that the law changed less at home than it expected. None of this constitutes legal advice, and households with a specific concern about a platform’s compliance should refer to eSafety directly.

Sources: Social media age restrictions, eSafety Commissioner (https://www.esafety.gov.au/about-us/industry-regulation/social-media-age-restrictions); Which platforms are age-restricted?, eSafety Commissioner (https://www.esafety.gov.au/about-us/industry-regulation/social-media-age-restrictions/which-platforms-are-age-restricted); Social media age restrictions for young people, eSafety Commissioner (https://www.esafety.gov.au/young-people/social-media-age-restrictions)