Australia slaps meta, tiktok, snap and youtube for letting kids under 16 slip through age gates
Australia’s safety watchdog has officially run out of patience with Silicon Valley’s age-check theater. On Tuesday eSafety released its first audit of the world’s toughest under-16 social-media ban and found that Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube are still greasing the turnstiles for kids who want in.
The 104-page compliance report lands less than four months after the law took effect and already names the exact loopholes teens exploit: recycle a driver’s-license photo from Google Images, loop the same face-scan until the algorithm blinks, or simply lie—then lie again when the platform asks for a do-over. ‘Reasonable steps’ the statute demands are, so far, a mirage.
Fines worth a quarter-billion aud are now on the table
Each company can be hit with up to 49.5 million AUD per breach. Commissioner Julie Inman Grant confirmed investigators are ‘gathering evidence for litigation’ and expect to file the first cases by mid-year. The message: Australia is done negotiating; it is counting violations and stacking penalties.
Meta answered with a familiar shrug—‘age verification is hard’—while Snap, TikTok and YouTube issued variations of ‘we’re reviewing the findings’. None volunteered to raise the drawbridge; all warned that stricter gates could lock out legitimate adult users. Translation: growth still trumps child safety.
The audit arrives days after a U.S. jury pinned Meta and Google with liability for a 20-year-old woman’s social-media addiction, a verdict that has tobacco-litigation vibes written across it. Australia’s regulator plainly hopes to ride that momentum, turning public outrage into courtroom leverage.
Early data show the ban has trimmed but not eliminated teen accounts. eSafety’s own surveys suggest thousands of under-16 profiles remain live, many created after December 10. The agency’s blunt assessment: platforms possess the tech to bar kids today; they simply choose the cheaper option of pretending to try.
Silicon Valley’s standard defense—‘we’re building better AI filters’—sounds thinner each time a 13-year-old posts dance videos from an account that passed four selfie checks. Australia is calling that bluff with subpoenas and million-dollar invoices. If the first fines land, the industry will learn that ‘compliance’ is no longer a slide in a quarterly earnings deck; it’s a line item on a balance sheet that bleeds.