Imagine for a moment that you’re an Australian 14-year-old (if you are an Australian 14-year-old, well, thank you for reading Business Insider, first of all. You can skip ahead). Life is already hard enough — your toilets flush the other way, and there’s that whole cane toad problem. But worst of all, as of December 2025, your government banned social media like Instagram, TikTok, and Snap for kids under 16. Crikey, right?
But much like the resolve and perseverance of Olympic breakdancer ‘Raygun,’ you are going to keep forging your own path, haters and naysayers be damned. So you figure out a way (it’s not hard!) to skirt around the age restriction and scroll, watch, chat, and post on your favorite social media apps.
You, an imaginary Australian teen, are not alone.
According to a report by parental-control tool company Qustodio, the Australian social media ban has been impressively ineffective. Bloomberg writes about the report:
Some 26% of children between the ages of 13 and 15 were on TikTok as of last month, just one percentage point below the rate prior to Australia’s groundbreaking rules coming into effect, the parental control software maker said. The rate for children between the ages of 10 and 12 is higher now than before the ban, according to the data.
What Qustodio found across Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat use, there was a distinct drop in use among 10-12 year olds and 13-15 year olds for a few weeks right when the ban started in December 2025. But after a few months, kids steadily got back on, nearing or matching pre-ban levels.
Take a look at the TikTok user chart from November 2024 until July 2026. That blip in the middle is when the ban started — and now it’s back up. The graphs for other apps looked similar.
Qustodio’s report is based on its own internal data of users — kids whose parents have installed its parental control and monitoring on their devices. They point out that their dataset focuses on kids whose parents already pay for their app blocking software, which means that the use of these social apps among across all Australian teens/kids is probably way higher.
The general findings of this recent report are similar to what the Australian government’s own eSafety commission found this spring: the amount of 10- to 15-year-olds using social media apps had only dropped from 86% to about 81%.
Most teens surveyed said that they didn’t find it difficult to evade the ban. That’s partly because age verification is a tricky thing. For example, in the UK, some enterprising kids were drawing fake mustaches on themselves to get around age-restriction systems that used facial recognition.
So where does that leave the teens? I’m not sure.
In the months since Australia’s ban went into effect, other countries have followed suit. Similar bans are either already in place or in the works in France, the UK, Indonesia, and Malaysia. New Zealand just proposed a similar law on Monday, although it hasn’t been passed yet.
It seems highly unlikely that, even if more countries impose these bans (or if the tech companies can figure out an effective method of age verification without huge privacy intrusions), we’ll suddenly live in a world where young teens and kids aren’t on any social media platforms. Sure, there might be some drop due to tighter barriers or simply because kids will be less interested in certain apps if their peers aren’t using them. Social apps like Snapchat are probably no fun without friends, but something that’s more about consuming content like YouTube will be just as compelling for kids.
And although most adults agree that mainlining TikTok for 12 hours a day isn’t good for most growing minds, there’s plenty of room for debate about whether an outright ban on kids under 16 is the ideal way of balancing the potential risks and harms of social media (addictive algorithms, harmful content) with the benefits (connection with peers, self-expression).
The settlement Meta agreed to on Wednesday might be a move toward a good middle ground here. It will create stricter time limits for users under 18: a 2-hour daily time limit that can only be lifted by parents, a “default block” from 12 a.m. to 6 a.m., and no push notifications during school hours.
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