The Australian government has officially passed legislation to ban children under the age of 16 from using social media platforms. The world-first law mandates that companies like Meta, TikTok, and X implement robust age-verification systems, with the threat of multi-million dollar fines for non-compliance as the country moves toward a stricter digital environment.
Meta has deleted over 544,000 accounts belonging to under-16s in Australia following the implementation of the country's landmark social media ban. Despite this large-scale removal, Meta argues that the crackdown is failing its objectives and is calling for age verification to be handled at the app store level by Apple and Google instead.


