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Meta has deactivated 756,000 Australian accounts it believes belonged to under-16s, a figure it disclosed as the country’s world-first social media ban moves from threat to enforcement.
The company says 462,000 of those accounts were on Instagram and 294,000 on Facebook, all removed between December 2025 and June 2026.
It is a big, headline-friendly number, and Meta clearly wants it read as proof of good faith. The trouble is that a large removal count says very little about whether the policy is actually keeping teenagers off the platforms, which is rather the point of the whole exercise.
A company can remove a great many accounts and still be losing the wider argument, especially when the accounts keep coming back.
The ban itself took effect on 10 December 2025, when Australia became the first country to bar under-16s from mainstream social media outright.
The rules cover Meta’s Facebook and Instagram alongside TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat, and others, and they put the compliance burden squarely on the platforms rather than on parents.
On paper, that is a bold regulatory experiment. In practice, the early evidence is far less flattering, because Australia has already accused Meta, TikTok, and YouTube of not complying as regulators lose patience with the industry’s progress.
The gap between the numbers and reality is stark. Independent research and government figures indicate that more than 80% of under-16s were still using social media during the ban’s first three months, which suggests the removed accounts are a fraction of the teenagers actually online.
None of this is especially surprising to anyone who has watched teenagers meet a rule they dislike. Lying about a birthday, borrowing an adult’s details, or spinning up a fresh account takes minutes, so the ban works far better on paper than it does in practice.
Meta, for its part, insists it is throwing serious technology at the problem. It says it uses AI to scan profiles for contextual clues, the giveaway birthday post, a mention of a school grade, and pairs that with photo-based age-estimation software that tries to guess how old a user looks.
The company also leans on behavioural signals, inferring age from patterns of activity that tend to mark out younger users. And when an account is deleted, Meta says it blocks attempts to recreate it, an acknowledgement that determined teenagers will keep trying.
Age-estimation of this kind is notoriously imprecise, though, and it tends to err in whichever direction is least embarrassing for the platform. A system confident enough to remove three-quarters of a million accounts is also a system making a great many judgement calls about people’s faces and habits.
Canberra, meanwhile, has decided the answer is sharper teeth. Australia has moved to raise penalties and arm its regulator, lifting the maximum fine for non-compliance to about A$99m, roughly $69.75m, and granting officials expanded powers to demand internal documents.
Those powers matter because they change the nature of the pressure. It is one thing to ask a platform how many accounts it removed, and quite another to compel it to hand over the evidence of what it knew and when, which is harder to spin into a press release.
The politics have grown pointed as executives from Meta, Google’s YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat testified before parliament, each keen to show diligence while resisting the suggestion that the ban is theirs to enforce alone. The performance has not entirely convinced lawmakers, who have grown wary of being handed reassurance in place of results.
Nor is the legislative side settled, since the Senate has delayed the fix that campaigners hoped would tighten the regime. For now, Australia is left holding a landmark law, an impressive-sounding removal figure, and a stubborn majority of teenagers who, by almost every available measure, never really left in the first place.
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