UK, UAE latest to announce social media bans for children. Inside the Australia experience

Enforcement will target technology companies, not children, the government said. Social media companies that fail to show that they have taken “reasonable steps” to keep children off their services face significant fines.

“Every parent can see it with their own eyes. Social media is making children unhappy,” Starmer said while announcing the policy.

Starmer said the ban was influenced by Australia’s experience, and that the UK would go further. He did not dispute that some teenagers would find ways around the restriction, but argued that the difficulty of enforcement had never been accepted as a reason to abandon an age limit for alcohol.

Days later, on June 18, the UAE announced a resolution to ban social media for children under the age of 15 and other restrictions for teenagers accessing such apps.

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Australia had set the template. The Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024 came into effect on December 10 last year, making Australia the first country to enforce a nationwide restriction. Under its law, Instagram, Facebook, Threads, Snapchat, YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, Twitch, X and Kick are required to take reasonable steps to block users under the age of 16 from holding accounts.

Companies that fail to comply face fines of up to 49.5 million Australian dollars, roughly $32 million. The Australian government has said that almost 5 million accounts identified as belonging to children were shut down in the weeks after the ban, and action to remove another 300,000 was taken by March 2026.

Indonesia enforced a similar age restriction in March 2026, covering platforms that could expose young people to addiction, pornography, online scams and cyberbullying. Brazil enacted a law requiring those under 16 to link social media accounts to a legal guardian, while also prohibiting addictive platform features such as infinite scroll.

Canada introduced legislation this year to establish a Digital Safety Commission with the power to bar children under 16 from social media unless social media companies demonstrate that they have removed harmful content. Malaysia also requires social media apps with more than 8 million users in the country to block users under the age of 16 to hold accounts. France, Spain, Denmark, Greece, South Korea and Thailand are among those studying or advancing similar measures.

HT reported in February this year that the Indian government was considering age-related restrictions for social media use.

Social media companies have expectedly opposed the restrictions. Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, warned that such restrictions pose a greater risk to children. Responding to the UK’s announcement, a Meta spokesperson said: “As we’ve seen in Australia, bans risk isolating teens from online communities and information, and driving them to unregulated alternatives that lack built-in protections and parental controls.” Alphabet-owned YouTube similarly warned that a “blanket ban pushes kids out of curated, supervised, beneficial experiences and towards anonymous, less-safe services”.

Before the restrictions were enforced, the Australian government commissioned an independent Age Assurance Technology Trial (AATT) to evaluate verification methods for accuracy, usability, privacy concerns and accessibility. Its findings shaped the guidance subsequently issued by Australia’s online safety regulator, the eSafety Commissioner.

The guidance recommended against a single mandatory method and urged companies to allow a layered system to detect if an underage user was trying to open or operate an account. Social media companies cannot rely only on a user’s declared age – which is submitted when a user is signing up for an account – to comply with the ban.

One of the methods, for instance, is age inference. Social media apps can draw on existing behavioural data such as IP address geolocation, device history, usage patterns, the vocabulary in posts and the interest groups a user follows to flag accounts that may belong to those under 16.

Another is facial age estimation. Companies can partner with third parties, which verify age through artificial intelligence technologies. In simpler terms, a user submits a selfie or a video selfie, which is analysed by a software that comes up with an estimated age range. To allay privacy concerns, the companies verifying the age do not store the images after an age estimate is generated.

The third method is identity verification. Social media companies can seek identity documents or check a user’s age with a bank or an email service. In these cases, the user can provide credit card details, and the company can get in touch with a bank to confirm only the user’s age.

Compliance is not a one-time check. Social media companies are expected to monitor behavioural signals continuously, and act if there’s any suspicion that a user may be under-age.

Also read: Global reassessment of social media for youth

Within days of Australia enforcing the restriction, social media was flooded with posts by youngsters claiming they were still online.

Journalists also documented multiple ways used by children to circumvent the ban. The Washington Post reported in December 2025 that a 14-year-old from New South Wales said she would get around the facial checks by having her mother do the scan in her place.

According to the Fortune report, a Reddit user suggested using a face mask sold on a Chinese e-commerce platform to confuse age recognition systems.

More commonly, teenagers turned to VPNs — virtual private networks, software that routes internet traffic through servers in other countries – to mask the user’s actual location and bypass geographic restrictions.

But the VPN problem was anticipated by Australia. Information Age, a publication that covers the country’s technology policies, reported that eSafety told companies they could use services to detect VPN usage and cross-reference IP intelligence data to spot users trying to circumvent the restrictions.

Australia’s communications minister, Anika Wells, expressed confidence that the volume of behavioural data platforms held on users would ultimately catch those using borrowed credentials or location-masking tools, Time reported in April this year.

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“Patterns of reduced account ownership were observed across 10 platforms,” it said in a March report.

But the regulator also noted that despite the reductions, a “substantial proportion of children under 16 retained accounts on age-restricted platforms”.

Another survey of 1,050 Australians aged 12 to 15, conducted in April 2026 by the Molly Rose Foundation, a suicide prevention organisation, found more than 60% of children who had social media accounts before the ban still had access to at least one account.

About two-thirds of respondents also said the companies had taken no action to restrict their accounts. The foundation’s CEO described the results as “major questions about the effectiveness of Australia’s social media ban”, Fortune reported in April 2026.

(With inputs from agencies)