Australia slams meta, tiktok and youtube for letting kids under 16 sneak past age gates
Australia’s eSafety watchdog has blown the whistle on five of the planet’s biggest social platforms, warning that their under-16 lockout is still more marketing slogan than engineering reality. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube were meant to slam the door on December 10, 2025; instead, the regulator’s first compliance scan found children cycling through the same flimsy age checks “until one finally lets them in”.
The $34 million question: will the fines ever land?
eSafety’s 52-page dossier, released Tuesday, concludes that none of the investigated services meet the “reasonable steps” standard baked into the landmark Online Safety Act. Investigators watched minors create fresh accounts after being told they were too young, simply by re-trying the same selfie or credit-card stunt. In one test, a 14-year-old was asked to upload ID; when the scan failed, the platform served the same prompt again—no cooling-off period, no human review, no friction.
The penalty ceiling is brutal: up to 49.5 million Australian dollars per breach, roughly 34 million USD. Commissioner Julie Inman Grant has already instructed lawyers to start drafting statement-of-claim templates. “These companies have the tech today,” she said. “They can comply tonight or keep gambling against escalating consequences.”
Meta’s line: age verification is “industry-wide” hard
Meta fired back with the familiar chorus—online age proof is “a complex challenge”. Yet internal emails subpoenaed in a parallel U.S. lawsuit show product managers discussing an under-13 TikTok rival code-named “Project Baseline” as late as 2023. The same week Australia’s report dropped, a Florida jury pinned a $100 million mental-health verdict on Meta and Google, arguing their algorithms addicted a six-year-old who later attempted suicide. The tobacco moment social giants dreaded—personal-liability cracks in Section 230-style armour—is no longer theoretical.
Lo que nadie cuenta es que eSafety is measuring compliance with a metric the companies refuse to publish: how many new accounts belong to 13- to 15-year-olds who slipped through in the last 90 days. TikTok claims its “youth portal” blocks 99.3% of under-age sign-ups globally, but won’t share country-level data. YouTube points to its “supervised experiences” for tweens, yet testers bypassed them in under two minutes using a prepaid Visa gift card.
Inside the regulator’s war room
Investigators are now subpoenaing ad-targeting logs. If a 15-year-old’s profile was ever tagged “interested in alcohol” or “single”, that is prima facie evidence the platform knew the birth date was bogus. eSafety’s tech unit is also running differential-privacy queries on 10 million anonymised device IDs to estimate how many phones toggle between a child’s gaming app and an adult-labelled social feed within the same five-minute window.
Timeline crunch: the commissioner wants at least one infringement notice filed before Australia’s winter parliamentary session. Once served, the platforms have 28 days to mount a defence; after that, civil penalties compound daily while the story stays on the front page of every global tech vertical.
La cifra habla por sí sola: since December, under-16 monthly active users across the five networks have dropped only 11%—a rounding error against the marketing budgets spent announcing sweeping bans. Parents, meanwhile, are downloading VPNs to mask their kids’ locations, turning the ban into a nationwide game of whack-a-mole.
The last time Canberra took on Big Tech, the News Media Bargaining Code forced Google to ink cheque after cheque to local publishers. This time the leverage is even simpler: either build age gates that actually gate, or fund Australia’s public mental-health budget one nine-digit fine at a time. No questions, no metaphors—just a invoice in the mail.