Meta has provided an update to the market about how it is complying with Australia’s social media age ban law, which came into effect on 11 December 2025.
The social media company, whose platforms Facebook, Instagram and Threads fall under the new age restriction legislation, has removed 544,052 accounts that it understands belongs to under-16 year olds.
More than half of these were removed from Instagram (330,639), followed by Facebook (173,497) and Threads (39,916).
In updating the market Meta said: “the initial impacts we have seen as a result of the law that suggest it is not meeting its objectives of increasing the safety and well-being of young Australians” and that it holds “concerns about determining age online without an industry standard”.
Meta has long advocated for age verification and parental approval to take place at the app store level, rather than via individual apps; a proposal that has met resistance from Google’s Play and Apple’s App Store.
Meta said that since the implementation of Australia’s social media ban law, a number of concerns have been raised by experts, youth groups and many parents.
These include:
- Isolating vulnerable teens from getting support from online communities;
- Driving teens to less regulated apps and parts of the internet, as has been noted by increases in downloads in alternative apps;
- Inconsistent age verification methods across industry and challenges with “natural error margins” at the age-16 boundary; and,
- Little interest in compliance from many teens and parents as noted in surveys by Resolve Political Monitor and ABC.
“To ensure all teens are protected online, we believe legislation should require app stores to verify age and obtain parental approval before their teens under 16 can download an app,” Meta wrote.
“This is the only way to guarantee consistent, industry-wide protections for young people, no matter which apps they use, and to avoid the whack-a-mole effect of catching up with new apps that teens will migrate to in order to circumvent the social media ban law.”
Meta, which had introduced Teen Account protections to prevent harmful content from reaching young people, also claimed that allowing teens to view social media content on apps that don’t require a login, such as YouTube and TikTok, are still subject to “algorithmic experiences”
Since the law came into effect, Meta has become a founding partner of the OpenAge Initiative, a non-profit focused on age assurance.
OpenAge has launched a new range of age verification tools called AgeKeys, which are the first interoperable, privacy-preserving global age signals.
Users have the ability to set up a verified age key, which is then stored on their device, and Meta said this allows those users to share verified age signals with multiple participating platforms in a privacy-preserving manner.
They can verify their AgeKey in multiple ways, such as with a government-issued ID, financial information, face estimation, or national digital wallets. Meta will begin to integrate this tool into its apps in Australia and other markets in 2026.
The Australian rollout of a social media under-16 age ban is being closely watched in other countries, including the UK.
In the past week, Conservatives leader Kemi Badenoch said that if the Tories are returned to power, they will introduce a similar ban.
Some British political observers predict the Starmer Government could introduce a social media age restriction policy ahead of the next UK election.
