Australia’s Under-16 Social Media Ban: First Study Findings

In late 2024, Australia passed one of the strictest online-safety laws in the world: no social media accounts for anyone under 16. Governments across Europe watched closely. Now the first independent study is in, and it is a reality check for every parent who hoped a law might solve the problem for them.

What the study actually found

Researchers at the University of Newcastle in Australia, publishing in The BMJ, tracked 408 teenagers aged 12 to 17 before and three months after the ban took effect. The headline numbers:

85% kept using the restricted platforms.
There was no significant drop in the time they spent on social media each day.
Many simply worked around the rules, using a fake age or logging into someone else’s account.

The researchers are careful to call these early, preliminary findings, measured only three months after the law started. But the direction is clear, and it matches what most parents already suspect: a determined teenager finds a way around a rule they never agreed to.

This matters because the concerns behind these laws are real. Heavy social media use in adolescents is linked to anxiety, sleep problems, cyberbullying, and depression. The goal is right. The mechanism, on its own, is leaky.

Watch: the researchers explain the findings

The BMJ published a short video walking through what the team measured and why the ban had so little early effect. It is worth a few minutes of any parent’s time.

Why a ban alone falls short

The study’s core lesson is blunt. Age restrictions on their own cannot protect children without a way to enforce them. A law can tell a 14-year-old they may not have an account. It cannot stop them from typing in a different birth year, borrowing a friend’s login, or opening the same content in a browser. The barrier exists on paper. On the phone in the child’s hand, very little has changed.

What Europe is preparing next

Europe is not standing still, and its approach tries to close that gap by shifting responsibility onto the platforms:

In Greece, new rules take effect on 1 January 2027 that put age verification on the platforms themselves, not on families.
France, Denmark, and the UK are moving toward similar restrictions, with the UK targeting 2027 for stricter age checks and limits on the riskiest features.
The European Commission is building common age-verification tools so member states apply a consistent standard.

This is stronger than a simple ban. But notice where it operates: upstream, at the moment of sign-up. Even the best verification system decides who is allowed to create an account. It says much less about what happens next, on the device, in the hundreds of small daily moments that actually shape a child’s relationship with their screen.

The layer that bans and age checks leave out

Put the pieces together and a pattern appears. Bans set the rule. Verification tries to enforce it at the door. Neither one sits where children actually spend their time: on the device, across dozens of apps and browsers, long after any sign-up screen. That last stretch, from a policy to a child’s real behavior, is the part no regulation can reach. It belongs to families.

That is the layer SafeNeat is built for. Not to replace good laws, but to give parents the practical, on-the-device tools a ban never could:

See what your child is actually using, and for how long, instead of guessing.
Set screen-time limits and schedules that hold, including quiet hours for sleep.
Filter and block content across apps and browsers, not just at one sign-up page.
Get alerted when something needs your attention, so you can start a conversation instead of a confrontation.

And because SafeNeat is built privacy-first, with end-to-end encryption, what you see about your child stays inside your family. It is not sold to advertisers or left readable on a server.

The takeaway for parents

The Australian result is not an argument against regulation. Platform accountability and age verification matter, and they are on the way. But the first evidence is a useful reminder: you do not have to wait until 2027, and you should not assume a law will do the work for you. The rules are being written upstream. The day-to-day still happens at home. The families who pair sensible boundaries with tools that can actually enforce them are the ones who will not be caught out the next time a headline says a ban did not work.

Sources

Study (The BMJ, June 2026): bmj.com/content/393/bmj-2026-363695
Plain-language summary (BMJ Group): bmjgroup.com
University of Newcastle press release: newcastle.edu.au