Ten months on, Australia's under-16 social media ban has removed 4.4m accounts and created a VPN boom

Australia's ban on social media for children under 16, the first in the world, has led to the removal or suspension of 4.4 million accounts since it took effect in December, the online safety regulator said on Monday in its first full assessment of the law.

The eSafety Commissioner's report found that the ten platforms covered by the ban, including the largest video, messaging and photo-sharing services, had closed accounts they identified as belonging to under-16s and blocked a further 9 million attempts to create new ones. Surveys commissioned by the regulator found that 58% of 13- to 15-year-olds said they no longer used any of the covered platforms, against 92% who used at least one before the ban.

The same surveys found that 34% of the age group said they still had access to at least one banned platform, most commonly through a VPN that disguises their location, an account in a parent's name or an older sibling's device. Downloads of VPN apps in Australia rose by 480% in the month after the ban and remain at four times their previous level.

“The policy has done what a policy can do. It has made the default no,” said Dr Fiona Marsh, who researches adolescent media use at the University of Sydney and advised the regulator. “The teenagers who were lightly attached have mostly drifted off and say they sleep better. The teenagers who were heavily attached have found a way round it, as anyone who has met a 15-year-old could have predicted. The question nobody can yet answer is whether the second group is smaller than it would have been.”

Kylie Brennan, a nurse from Wollongong with children aged 12 and 15, said the law had changed the conversation at home rather than the technology. “Before, I was the only parent on the street saying no. Now it is the law and I am not the enemy,” she said. “My 15-year-old has a VPN. I know she does. But she uses it for an hour, not six, because there is no one else on there.”

The report found that the fall in use of the main platforms had been accompanied by a rise in the use of services not covered by the ban, including gaming chat platforms, group messaging apps and several smaller networks that have marketed themselves as “no ID required”. The regulator said it had written to 14 such services and would recommend that three be added to the list.

Platforms have been fined a total of A$31m (£16m) for failing to take reasonable steps, with one video service accounting for A$22m of that. The companies have argued that the government's refusal to mandate a specific age verification method left them to guess, and that the methods they had adopted, mainly facial age estimation, misjudged the age of about one user in 12.

Governments in Denmark, France, Spain and New Zealand have announced plans for similar laws. The British government, which considered a ban in 2025, has said it will await the Australian evidence; Monday's report is the first of three the regulator will publish before the law's formal review in 2027.