Teens Are Already Getting Around Australia's Social Media Ban

Australia made history when it enacted a ban on social media for children under 16 last week. But although the laws have drawn praise and criticism from different corners of the public, their efficacy remains to be seen. Teenagers who fall under the restricted age limit seem to have no difficulty circumventing the ban and maintain unrestricted access to their online accounts.

It's a tale as old as the internet that no wall placed before youngsters will go unscaled. Australian leadership celebrated the law's introduction on December 10, with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese declaring, "Across Australia, those under 16 are starting their day a little differently, without social media." The kids beg to differ. In fact, many never experienced even an interruption of service. "None of my accounts on any platform has been shut down," one 15-year-old told CNN, "not even the ones that I put my real age."

The ban only applies to a handful of the most popular social media sites like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Critics worry this will drive children out onto the wider internet, where there are even fewer protections for them. But through a mix of fairly sophomoric workarounds and apparent system failures, many haven't had to leave their favorite platforms in the first place. Here's what's happening, and what it could mean for a wave of internet ID laws around the world.

For children who grew up with the internet, dodging filters has always been a rite of passage. Whether parental filters on home computers or schoolwide VPNs, systems designed to keep youngsters out of online trouble have often appeared to underestimate their grasp of technology, proving to be inconvenient at best. Now, governments are beginning to learn that lesson in real-time, with Australia the latest to be humbled by its youth.

It was already common practice for teenagers to dodge preexisting platform restrictions for child-controlled accounts by misstating their date of birth when they sign up to a platform, and some Australian under-16s with such accounts claim they didn't experience a loss of service to their social media. Others simply used AI-generated photos of adults, taking a cue from users in the United Kingdom who had used similar techniques to bypass age-restriction laws that went into effect this past summer. In some cases, parents and older friends helped children maintain an online presence by using their own faces and identities to age-verify the accounts. If all else fails, the best VPN services are at the ready to help users pretend their web traffic is originating from outside the country.

Moreover, because the ban is limited to a small handful of platforms, teens are likely to migrate elsewhere if more effective methods emerge to enforce the ban. Banning TikTok but not TikTok alternatives is the result of not applying a blanket ban. Platforms like Discord were not included in the law, despite years of reports about child sexual exploitation on the gaming-centric community platform. Some sites, such as the infamous 4chan, remain unrestricted despite their ongoing reputations for graphic imagery and hate speech, among other concerns.

The ease with which many young teenagers have circumvented Australia's social media ban on them highlights the difficulty of locking down the internet. At the core of the World Wide Web are openness and interoperability, principles that run counter to attempts to silo users. Even China, which famously maintains the world's most robust internet firewall, cannot fully prevent determined citizens from accessing the broader web. In Australia, where the goal is merely to prevent a subsection of users from accessing a small handful of websites and platforms, the needle is even harder to thread. If age-verification tools are too draconian, they will impede adult users, but even a slight crack in that armor will allow children to entirely elude restrictions.

Advocates of the law insist that breaking away from social media could help reverse negative mental health trends among youth. Critics worry that, in addition to being ineffective, blanket bans are not an evidence-based approach to the underlying concerns around the online lives of children  — and some have suggested that the duty to protect children online falls to parents, not governments. Others fear that a data breach of the companies handling age verification could expose the private information and identities of children and adults alike. And yet more warnings come from freedom-of-speech advocates, who are increasingly concerned about governments' ability to track dissent and curtail freedoms.

With a slew of age- and identity-verification laws winding their way through legislative bodies in the United States and around the globe, all eyes are on Australia. Social media companies will watch closely, too. As goes the land down under, so may go the future of the open internet.