Eight months after Australia’s ban, teen TikTok use is down one percentage point

Eight months into the world’s first under-16 social media ban, 26% of Australian children aged 13 to 15 are still using TikTok, one percentage point below where the figure sat before the law took effect.

The data comes from the parental control software maker Qustodio, and it puts numbers to something already visible in the enforcement record, which is that the ban has not been complied with in the way the legislation assumed.

The shape of the recovery is what makes the data interesting. Usage fell sharply when the law came into force and then climbed steadily back, which is the pattern of a barrier being worked around rather than a behaviour being changed.

“What we’ve seen is an immediate drop to a degree, but slowly but surely the numbers have started to increase again,” said Yasmin London, Qustodio’s global online safety expert. Instagram and Snapchat sit below TikTok in the figures but follow the same curve.

The most awkward finding concerns the youngest group. TikTok use among children aged 10 to 12 is now higher than it was before the ban, a cohort the law was most clearly designed to protect and one that was never supposed to be on the platform in the first place.

How they are getting through is not mysterious. Misstated ages, VPNs, and age verification that does not work well enough to catch a determined 14-year-old are the obvious routes, and Australian testers found the age checks stumbling early.

WhatsApp, which is not covered by the ban, rose from 27% to 36% among 13- to 15-year-olds, which suggests some of the displaced activity simply moved to a service the law does not reach.

That is a predictable consequence of defining the restriction by platform category rather than by behaviour. A messaging app that is exempt becomes more attractive precisely because it is exempt, whatever is actually happening inside it.

None of this settles whether the policy was wrong, only whether this version of it works. A rule that cannot be enforced tells you something about enforcement design rather than about whether under-16s should be on these platforms.

The Australian government acknowledged inadequate compliance in June and said it would double maximum penalties to A$99mn while strengthening enforcement powers. No platform has been fined to date, which is the more telling fact.

A regime with unused penalties is a regime the companies can price. Eight months of non-compliance without a financial consequence establishes a fairly clear expectation about what the law costs to ignore.

The platforms have their own incentives running against compliance, since a teenage user lost is a user lost for years rather than months. Meta has argued for age checks to sit at the app store rather than on each platform, which would move the obligation somewhere else entirely.

The findings carry weight beyond Australia because so many governments have been waiting for them. New Zealand has introduced its own under-16 bill, Norway has been preparing one, and the EU has been building age verification infrastructure on the assumption that this approach works.

Qustodio’s data has a limitation worth stating plainly. It is drawn from devices running parental control software, which is not a random sample of Australian children and may skew towards households already engaged with monitoring, so the direction of travel is more reliable than the absolute percentages.

There is a reading in which the data is less damning than it looks. Eight months is short for a behavioural intervention, the enforcement powers are only now being strengthened, and a policy that has not yet been tested by an actual fine has not really been tested at all.

Even allowing for that, the trend is not the one the policy needed. A ban that produces a one-point reduction in the target behaviour after eight months is not obviously a ban, and the government’s drafting copies of it now have eight months of evidence they did not have when they started.