Banning Kids From Social Media Sounds Simple. Actually Doing It Is Not.

Key points

• Australia's Online Safety Amendment Bill set a minimum age of 16 for social media and a ban took effect in December 2025.
• The Australian government doubled its maximum penalty for breaking that age law to $99 million in early 2025.
• The United Kingdom announced plans to ban users aged 16 and under from social media platforms, including gaming sites.
• U.S. Senator Brian Schatz introduced the Kids Off Social Media Act in 2025, which would bar children under 13 from having accounts; the bill is still moving through Congress.
• One platform under Australia's rules contacted users who had already stated they were under 16, raising immediate questions about whether the age-check was genuine.

The premise seems straightforward: if social media harms children, stop children from using it. Australia tried first. Canada and the United Kingdom followed. Several U.S. states, including California and New York, passed their own rules without waiting for federal action. The platforms in the crosshairs include TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube.

But a premise and a working law are very different things.

How do you actually stop a teenager from lying about their age?

You cannot, at least not easily. The only reliable method is to make users prove their age with real documents, such as a driving licence or a credit card. That creates a new problem immediately: companies must now collect sensitive personal data they never wanted in the first place, and users, understandably, feel suspicious about handing it over.

"It's a really fine line to walk about how you're approaching what data you're collecting, what you're using to verify, and what you're retaining," Joe Kaufmann, global head of privacy and data protection at identity-verification company Jumio, told Dark Reading.

Australia's regulator, the eSafety commissioner, flagged early signs of trouble after the December 2025 rollout. One unnamed platform reached out to under-16 users who had already declared their real age, apparently offering them a second chance to "correct" it. The regulator noted dryly that it seemed obvious children would use that opening to lie their way through. Facial age-estimation technology, where software guesses a person's age from a photo, also drew criticism for its error rate.

Then there is the business problem. Platforms do not want to lose adult users caught in clunky checks. Every extra step in a sign-up or verification flow drives people away. Kaufmann describes companies rolling out changes that cause users real "discomfort" without actually keeping determined teenagers out.

Richard Bird, chief strategy and security officer at AI-governance firm Singulr AI, argues the framing is wrong from the start. "Social media platforms have refused to make meaningful progress on protecting children," he told Dark Reading. "It's a faulty product causing real human damage. When a product causes that kind of damage, regulation follows."

Bird prefers the term "age controls" over "bans". Driving ages, voting ages, and drinking ages are all age controls. Nobody considers them unusual. The mechanics for digital platforms are newer, but the concept is old.

For organisations that have to comply, Kaufmann offers two concrete priorities. First, collect only the minimum data needed to confirm an age, nothing extra. Second, use that data only for the stated purpose and delete it afterward. Transparency with users about both points, he says, is what separates a process people tolerate from one that triggers backlash.

Apple is building an age-verification tool into its operating system that could let apps confirm a user's age bracket without seeing the underlying documents. That kind of privacy-preserving design is where this is heading, whether platforms like it or not.