Australia’s Social Media Ban Driving Teens to Darker Corners Meta Warns

meta, is urging Australia’s government to reconsider its world-first social media ban for under-16s. According to the company, “the “blanket ban” strategy is already showing significant flaws in its. The tech giant is warning that the move could be doing more harm than good after it removed more than 544,000 accounts across Instagram, Facebook and Threads in the first week of police’s first-week of enforcement.

Meta wants Australia to rethink its social media ban on teens

The biggest issue with Meta’s is that removing teenagers from mainstream sites doesn’t prevent them from going online. This move is allegedly just driving them elsewhere, and it seems to be the only thing that drives s. The ban has been accompanied by a noticeable wave of young users towards other platforms since the December 10, 2025, when s were banned. These latter are small, less regulated and do not fall under the new law.”

The social media company says this is ‘whack-a-mole’ effect, which it calls a ‘wack-an-amelodge’ impact on the social network. Then teens go to alternative apps such as Lemon8 or Yope, in other words, the moment they are blocked from Instagram. In Meta’s view, these smaller services often lack the robust safety tools, reporting capabilities and moderation teams that larger platforms have been constructing for decades, meta claims. Their output would expose small children to more risks in “darker corners” of the Internet.

A call for app store responsibility

In addition to excluding specific apps, Meta is calling on Australia to move the burden of age verification into the app store level rather than banning certain apps. This would require Apple and Google to verify a user’s age and obtain parental consent before any app can even be downloaded.

This would create a consistent, industry-wide standard for every app that teen might try to use (not just ten list of the best apps they’re selected), Meta says. For a long-term solution, the tech giant says incentivizing companies to raise their safety standards and provide “age-appropriate experiences” is better than total ban on all of its own.

Youngsters allegedly resorting to VPNs, spoofing the AI, or adult accounts

Despite the massive deactivations, the ban has been unsurprisingly easy for determined teenagers to bypass. A number of are reportedly using VPNs as if they’re in another country, to pretend that they belong to the same country. In the meantime, others have smacked AI age-estimation tools with clever lighting or makeup to look older.

In addition to the technical hacks, some teens have just migrated to accounts owned by their parents. This makes it even hard for platforms to distinguish between adult and minor usage. That is what has led Meta to argue that the current law does not have a specific, industry-wide norm of how to determine age online. So, in essence it’s making “reasonable compliance” a moving target.

Given this situation, Meta Australia’s request to rethink the social media ban gains some weight.

What lies ahead?

The government of Australia, which is fined up to $49 per cent for . A firm statement by 5 million AUD for non-compliant platforms, is that the ban “is about protecting youth mental health” remains in its position. But Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has described the move as a ‘let kids be children’ away from addictive algorithms.

Yet, while the UK and France have similar laws in other countries, Meta argues for an even more nuanced approach to as opposed to this. Their goal is to focus on parental controls and app store oversight. The key to the global debate is whether one approach or the other will be a better choice. The “multi-layered process” of deactivating accounts is still a part of the tradition that s continue to use for this time.

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