Australia’s Social Media Ban Has Not Worked — For Now
Social media bans are facing their first test. In late 2025, Australia’s Social Media Minimum Age Act came into effect, restricting social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok from children under 16. But early evidence suggests that the ban has done little to curb use among kids, according to a study published in the BMJ this past summer. It is one of the first to show real-world data of the effectiveness of social media bans on young children.
The initial goal of the ban was to protect children’s mental health by mitigating the harms caused by cyberbullying and harmful content on social media. The law introduced a mandatory minimum age of 16 for accounts on certain social media platforms, which are responsible for enforcing those restrictions or are subject to fines. But the BMJ study found that the ban did not meaningfully affect whether children accessed social media platforms or the time that those users spent on them.
Moreover, the evidence for how apps impact mental health is mixed, some experts say. There’s a “wide gulf” between public perception and what the research actually shows, said Christopher Ferguson, a clinical psychologist at Stetson University, suggesting that the relationship between social media and wellbeing may be more complicated.
Whatever the consequences of social media, an outright ban by itself may not be the most effective way to address the problem, said Louise Holly, director of policy and research at the University of Geneva’s Digital Transformations for Health Lab. Rather, other strategies might have more of an impact, such as increasing media literacy, Ferguson said.
There’s a “wide gulf” between public perception and what the research actually shows.
Despite these question marks, countries such as France, Spain, India, and the United Kingdom are following Australia’s lead and have pursued nationwide laws to curb social media use, with varying levels of success. In the U.S., all 50 states have introduced legislation to restrict or regulate children’s access to social media or other digital platforms. Many such measures have faced legal challenges or been struck down by the courts. In July, the governor of New York announced the final rules for the state’s social media restriction law, requiring “social media companies to restrict algorithmically personalized feeds and nighttime notifications for users under the age of 18 unless they obtain parental consent.” In March 2026, the Australian government announced it was investigating five social media platforms for noncompliance.
Despite the BMJ study’s findings, Holly noted that it examined behaviors early after the ban, so time might tell if it does work or not: “To completely change people’s habits and kind of social practices within three months, I think it was unrealistic to think that there would be a huge difference.”
As social media use has increased among young people, so too has the worry about its effects on mental health. Higher social media use has been linked with increased depressive symptoms and declining mental health in adolescents and children. In August, Meta, parent company of social media applications Instagram and Facebook, agreed to pay up to $18 billion in penalties and make changes to its products to settle claims that the company intentionally designed the platforms with addictive features that harmed young people’s mental health.
But not all experts are convinced of social media’s net harm. The relationship between online use and negative effects can be quite small, according to some studies, and might be due to other factors, said Ferguson. For example, Ferguson said in his impression of some of the research he’s done, when controlling for factors such as family environment and school stress, those relationships disappear. Social media also can have benefits for some children, such as allowing them to connect with friends and get mental health support, said Sander van der Linden, a professor of social psychology at the University of Cambridge.
In a 2024 report, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine noted: “Contrary to the current cultural narrative that social media is universally harmful to adolescents, the reality is more complicated.” Scientists are still untangling the effects.
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As for whether bans on social media work to improve mental health for children, there is very little evidence, van der Linden added. In a general population of adults, social media restriction has small positive yet varied results, a 2025 meta-analysis found. Other meta-analyses in adolescent populations have found similar mixed results. But more randomized trials need to be conducted, van der Linden argued in a 2026 article. Bans on cell phones during school, a policy implemented to reduce distractions and improve academic achievement, offer some evidence, however. A study involving 1,200 secondary school students, published in 2025, found that students attending schools with restrictive phone bans had similar levels of self-reported wellbeing, anxiety, depression, and social media use outside of school hours to those attending schools without phone bans.
Despite the lack of robust evidence in favor of their impact on mental health, social media bans are popular with the public. In a poll conducted in August of 2024 in Australia, almost 80 percent of the public supported the age-based ban (although another poll found that only 25 percent were very or fairly confident that it would actually work). Bans are “politically popular, and they want to look like they’re quote-unquote ‘doing something,’” Ferguson said.
In the recent BMJ study, the authors had asked around 400 children about their social media use before the Australian ban was implemented, and again three months after. They found that use among 14- to 15-year-olds reduced slightly, but overall, the ban did not impact the proportion of children using social media or the time spent on the platforms. (The results were from self-reported use, which the authors acknowledged as a limitation of the study.)
The fault may lie with incomplete implementation of the law by social media platforms, the study suggested. Based on the law, platforms must take reasonable steps to prevent children under age 16 from creating or maintaining accounts, such as asking users to input their age or upload a picture of themselves. But only 66 percent of the surveyed children encountered any sort of age verification process, the researchers of the recent study found. And among those who did, many used fake accounts or found other loopholes.
Bans are “politically popular, and they want to look like they’re quote-unquote ‘doing something.’”
In a March 2026 update on the ban’s effect, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner reported that, while there was an initial large-scale removal of accounts, seven in 10 children still retained their accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok, based on a survey of the children’s parents. The commissioner tracks compliance through requests for information and discussions with platforms, research and testing, and data from complaints.
Lax enforcement may help explain the law’s limited effect, said Holly. “Introducing a law on its own isn’t going to be enough to change either children’s or the platform’s behaviors,” she said. “You need really strong enforcement.” But digital products are trickier to enforce and come at a privacy cost for children, since they sometimes have to upload a picture of themselves to confirm their age, said van der Linden.
In September, the Australian government increased the maximum fine to 109 million Australian dollars, or 76 million U.S. dollars, for platforms that fail to comply. (To date, the government has not issued any fines.) The move came with more power for the eSafety Commissioner to demand information and documents, including records from third parties, such as age-assurance companies and app store providers.
“It’s good to see that the measures are being strengthened,” Holly said. “Hopefully it means that other countries, if they do go down the same route of these restrictions, they’ll start from a higher level as well in terms of enforcement.”
While it might be too soon to tell whether Australia’s social media ban will be effective, history and science have shown that bans, on their own and without strong enforcement, in general do not tend to work to sway behavior, Holly said.
Because of the evidence on cell phone bans, for example, some experts argue that restricting access is not the best solution in the first place. “We have pretty clear evidence now that these cell phone bans don’t improve kids’ grades, they don’t improve their attention, they don’t improve their behavior, they don’t improve their mental health,” Ferguson said.
“Introducing a law on its own isn’t going to be enough to change either children’s or the platform’s behaviors. You need really strong enforcement.”
Rather, policymakers should focus on the design of these platforms, Holly said. For example, platforms are familiar with the types of features that can make it hard for people to stop using them, yet Holly has not seen any evidence that companies are redesigning those features. “They’re not taking away infinite scroll and their algorithm recommendations because they’re known to be harmful,” she said. “I’ve not seen any evidence of that kind of change happening.”
Improving social media literacy might be another more effective way to combat its downsides, Ferguson said. This strategy would entail teaching children about potential pitfalls of social media and how to regulate their use. “There’s practical steps that people can take, and kids can take, to make their social media experiences much more positive,” he said. “I would think the evidence points towards that being much more effective and much more constructive.”
A ban might just be one of the tools to help curb social media use in young children and could be viewed as only one part of a broader, multi-pronged approach, van der Linden said. “If the goal is friction, social change, those things can be achieved with other things than a ban.”
As a long-term approach by itself, “I don’t really see how this is going to pan out,” van der Linden said.