Australia tells social platforms not to reverify all users as under-16 ban nears

Australian authorities on Tuesday released guidelines telling social media companies they should not demand blanket age rechecks of all users as the country prepares to implement the world’s first ban on children younger than 16 holding social media accounts.

The guidance, published by eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, comes as the ban — enacted by Parliament last year — is scheduled to take effect on Dec. 10. It instructs platforms such as TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, Reddit, X and Instagram to take "reasonable steps" to prevent under-16s from having accounts, but says verifying the ages of every account holder would be "unreasonable."

"We think it would be unreasonable if platforms reverified everyone’s age," Inman Grant said in a statement accompanying the guidance. Her choice of the word "reverified" suggested regulators expect platforms to be able to rely on existing data to confirm that many users are already above the age threshold. She said companies already have "targeting technology" that can identify and focus on users under 16.

Under the law, platforms face fines of up to 50 million Australian dollars (about $33 million) for systemic failures to prevent children younger than 16 from holding accounts. The government gave social media companies a year to work out implementation details after the legislation passed in 2024.

Communications Minister Anika Wells said the government seeks to keep users' personal information as private as possible while still excluding children from accounts. "These social media platforms know an awful lot about us," Wells said. "If you have been on, for example, Facebook since 2009, then they know you are over 16. There is no need to verify."

Wells and Inman Grant will travel to the United States next week to discuss the guidelines with the owners of major platforms. The commissioner said regulators will expect companies to demonstrate that they have taken "reasonable steps" to exclude under-16s and that enforcement will focus on systemic shortcomings rather than instant, across-the-board removal of accounts.

"We don’t expect that every under-16 account is magically going to disappear on Dec. 10," Inman Grant said. "What we will be looking at is systemic failures to apply the technologies, policies and processes."

Critics of the legislation have warned that measures to enforce the ban could impinge on the privacy of all users if firms are required to prove every account holder is older than 16. Some privacy advocates and technology experts have also noted the limits and error rates of current age-verification tools.

Lisa Given, an information sciences expert at RMIT University in Melbourne, told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. that the government's guidance acknowledges those limitations. "It’s going to be up to each of the platforms to determine how they’re going to comply and it will be interesting to see if they test the limits of the definition of ‘reasonable steps,’" she said.

The law places responsibility on platforms to use their existing capabilities — including behavioral, account-history and advertising-targeting data — to identify likely underage users, implement age-gating and remove or block accounts where reasonable steps show an account holder is under 16. Regulators have signaled they will scrutinize platform-level systems and processes rather than individual edge cases.

Platform representatives have previously argued that broad age-verification requirements could harm user privacy and digital inclusion, and that no technical approach is foolproof. The companies face a deadline to show how they will comply and to avoid potential fines for systemic noncompliance once the ban takes effect in December.