Originally published: The Sydney Morning Herald, 14 June 2026
It took Cruz Condren about a week to lose his Snapchat account, and a few seconds to get it back.
“It asked me to verify my age by a camera,” says the 14-year-old from the Gold Coast. “I just asked my mum to scan her face because she’s over 18. It just let me back on.”
Six months after Australia became the first country to ban under 16s from social media, Cruz’s workaround – performed with his mother’s blessing – is the kind of evidence now being weighed in London, Brussels and Ottawa as governments decide whether to copy Australia’s experiment or learn from its mistakes.
Communications Minister Anika Wells spent Thursday morning dialling in to a London broadcast studio via Zoom to make the case for the former.
“A lot of people who are against a ban here are using what they describe as the evidence from Australia to say, look, this doesn’t work,” Sky News host Sophy Ridge put to her. “Loads of kids are getting around it, so what’s the point?”
Wells’ answer was that the sceptics “and their allies in big tech” want doubt cast over Australia’s experiment precisely so that nobody else tries it. “We’re not backing down, we’re going further,” she said, flagging a digital duty of care bill for federal parliament later this year.
The world is watching, and splitting. More than a dozen countries have announced plans to follow suit, by Wells’ count. Canada this week introduced its own bill, while the European Commission has flagged a legislative proposal as soon as this northern summer, with President Ursula von der Leyen pointedly adopting Canberra’s preferred language of a social media “delay” rather than a ban. Greece is restricting under 15s. A New Zealand bill modelled on the Australian law is before parliament.
Others are learning from what they perceive as Australia’s missteps. Britain has spent months weighing a blanket ban against targeted restrictions on the features that make platforms addictive – such as infinite scroll – promising to “look at expert and international evidence to get this right”, and the evidence its sceptics are studying hardest is Australia’s circumvention problem.
Washington has gone further still: the Trump administration now treats foreign regulation of American tech companies as an unfair trade barrier. Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, was summoned before US Congress in November by Republican Jim Jordan, who called her a “zealot” whose law “threatens speech of American citizens”. She refused to appear.
The awkward truth for Wells, though, is that the doubt is not coming only from big tech and its allies. It is coming from the regulator enforcing her law.
Research released last week by data firm Pureprofile, surveying 1025 parents, teachers and young Australians, found 78 per cent of under 16s still accessed banned platforms, barely down from 84 per cent before the ban. Only 31 per cent of children reported ever having their face scanned, and about half of those passed as over 16. Two in five admitted having tried to get around the restrictions.
Download the full ‘Australia’s Under-16s Social Media Ban Report – Wave 2’ report here >
