Australia has shut about 5 million under-16 accounts. Nobody yet knows whether a single child is better for it
olaiol.com
Since December 2025, Australia has barred everyone under 16 from social media, the first country to do so; France's judges struck down a similar ban in August, and the European Commission now proposes nothing under 13. The question is whether keeping children off the platforms protects them, or costs everyone's privacy and pushes them somewhere worse. So far the only thing anyone has counted is accounts, and accounts measure effort, not health.

Nine months in, the only thing anyone has counted is accounts, and accounts aren’t kids. Australia’s regulator found platforms letting under-16s retry the age check until they passed. France voted a similar ban this summer and its Constitutional Council struck it down: to check the kids you have to check everyone, and the law had no privacy guarantees for the adults. Meanwhile the two big US reviews of the evidence disagree on whether social media causes harm at all.

  • OLAIOL@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
    1·
    6 days ago

    Age checks in 2026: the bouncer stops the adult with a new SIM card and lets the 15-year-old hit “try again”. That button is doing a lot of heavy lifting.