Australia's Social Media Ban for Teens May Not Be the Best Solution, But It's Certainly Getting People Talking

Fifteen-year-olds were far from happy when Australia banned them from social media. No more Instagram, no more Snapchat, no more TikTok. Starting December 10, 2025, tech companies that failed to prevent under-16s from having accounts risked fines of up to 54.6 million Australian dollars (about $77 million).

In the weeks before the ban, teens shared tips on how to get around it; making a double chin to fool age-verification tools was one of them. Only one in four planned to stop using social media once the ban started. Two 15-year-olds, backed by a digital rights group, sought a High Court injunction to block it.

It’s easy to see why teenagers were appalled, says Jeff Hancock, a psychologist and founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab in California, which is working with the Australian government to evaluate the effects of the ban. I connect with my dance team and my soccer team, and I’ve created a small business, and it’s how I stay in touch with my grandma. And that’s getting taken away!’” Teenage disgust Down Under has done little to slow global momentum in the ban’s wake, though.

From Norway to Indonesia, Brazil to the United Kingdom, governments are crafting legislation to limit their teens’ access to social media— emboldened by widespread parental support, alarming declines in adolescent mental health and Jonathan Haidt’s best-selling book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. And it’s not just politicians who are taking on tech. So are the courts: Meta, which owns Instagram, has been ordered to pay almost $1 billion in penalties so far in 2026 after U.S. juries found the company liable for harming young users.

Many more lawsuits are in the works. Few dispute that some children are harmed by social media. Reports are legion of bullying and sexual and verbal abuse, as well as exposure to pornography, misogynistic and radicalization content, and materials that encourage eating disorders.

Features such as infinite scroll encourage incessant time on social media that may displace activities that are good for well-being, such as sleep and face-to-face time with friends. Yet after two decades of research, evidence that social media is toxic to the mental health of most adolescents remains inconclusive. Some hope that the natural before-and-after experiment presented by the Australian ban could be an opportunity to test the effects of social media more rigorously.