Key Findings
- Australia's social media ban for teenagers is less about child safety and more about infrastructureforcing platforms to roll out large-scale age verification systems that resemble a new form of online identity.
- Mandatory age verification could create serious privacy risksincluding biometric data collection, centralized identity honeypots, and increased government and platform controls over user identities.
- Silicon Valley's real fear is not the loss of advertising revenue today, but the loss of an entire future generation of users.disrupting habit formation and long-term platform growth as teens migrate elsewhere.
- Ban could accelerate internet fragmentationwith regional regulations, biometric gates and teenagers being pushed onto gray zone platforms that are harder for police to police, signaling a more regulated and less anonymous internet in the future.
Last week, Australia became the first country to block access to social media for anyone under 16. The unprecedented mandate forced TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and X to block around 1 million teenagers or face fines of up to A$49.5 million.
Headlines have largely focused on screen time and mental health, but there's a larger shift hidden beneath the surface. For this ban to take effect, platforms would have to implement age detection algorithms, selfie-based age estimation, and perhaps even government ID checks.
What Australia just went through As a practical measure for children's safety, this is the world's first national-level experiment in online identity infrastructure.
Other governments are watching closely. EU lawmakers have already hinted that Europe could follow Australia's lead, while a number of other countries are scrutinizing the model.
The real question is not whether teenagers will find workarounds—they will. Rather, the question is whether this will become the blueprint for future Internet regulation.
First large-scale trial of mandatory age verification
New legislation in Australia doesn't just tell teenagers to get off social media: it forces the platforms themselves to prove who is under 16 and block them.
Ten major platformsincluding TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and X (formerly Twitter), have been ordered to implement an immediate ban. On the first day, about 440,000 accounts were deleted on Snapchat, and about 200,000 were deactivated on TikTok.
The platforms have told Canberra that to comply with the new laws they will rely on a combination of:
- Conclusion about age based on user behavior patterns
- Age estimation based on selfies using facial analysis
- Additional loading of identifiers for cases requiring higher confidence
These measures are no longer experimental or fringe studies; they are part of the core login stack for millions of users.
Essentially, this is the beginning of a mandatory level of online identity, even if governments do not currently use this language to describe it. Participation on social platforms increasingly requires scanning, inference or documentation.
The privacy nightmare behind Australia's social media ban
Mandatory age verification introduces a completely new type of risk:
- Centralized biometric questioning of minors
- High-value identity decoys (as we know, data can and will be hacked sometimes on a large scale)
- Platforms gain unprecedented levels of demographic data
- Governments gain platform-level identity control
Intentionally or not, the Australian government has launched the world's first real stress test of a universal age verification infrastructure.
Silicon Valley's worst fear: a future without teenage users
Social media companies have been quickly note that children under 16 generate relatively little income from direct advertising, although a study conducted in late 2023 showed the opposite: platforms receive from 16 to 41 percent their income from users under 18 years of age.
Regardless of the veracity of this statement, it misses the real issue. Teens are not just today's customer base: they will be the customers of the next decade. Loyalty to platforms tends to form early, and losing an entire age group disrupts the habit-building process that underpins long-term growth and on which these platforms tend to depend.
That's why Australia's ban worries Silicon Valley so much. If one country can legally deny access to teenagers, others could conceivably follow suit.
Annual social media user growth is already declining across major platforms, and a sudden drop in time spent could scare off investors as much as lost revenue.
X they are embarrassed to answer from his official “Safety” account wrote: “This is not our choice, it is required by Australian law.” Clearly they are not the biggest fans of this law, and future earnings will undoubtedly be a factor.
There is also a behavioral wildcard to consider. Many teenagers interviewed by Reuters openly said they would find ways to circumvent the ban. This likely means a move to platforms like Discord, Telegram, VPN-enabled access, or decentralized services that lack the infrastructure and ability to use mainstream applications.
Ironically, the ban could push some teenagers to the dark corners of the internet, exacerbating one of the key risks that regulators are trying to mitigate.
The global domino effect and the split of the Internet
What is happening in Australia is already being observed far beyond its borders. European legislators they said openly that they want to “learn” from the ban, while the governments of Denmark, New Zealand and Malaysia are watching to see how it plays out in practice.
In combination with UK Internet Safety Actand growing parental pressure in the United States, the trend is clear: the era of the Internet with stricter age restrictions is supposedly beginning.
The technical implications are also significant. Once age verification becomes mandatory in one of the major markets, platforms will have no choice but to use the same infrastructure around the world.
This means increased use of biometric age checks, selfie-based assessments and behavioral inferences, as well as a growing disparity between national versions of the same platforms. Meanwhile, teens are likely to move to platforms that are harder to control, creating new gray areas of online interaction outside of mainstream social platforms.
The result could be a fragmented network: less anonymous, more regulated and increasingly shaped by national legislation. In recent months, we've seen this trend play out on another level: the influence of geopolitics on how large AI models behave and what they are allowed to say.
Australia just gave us a glimpse of the future of the Internet
Australia's social media ban on teens isn't really about TikTok or Instagram, it's about the infrastructure. For the ban to work, platforms need to implement age verification systems that don't just disappear once the headlines disappear. Other governments will study, reuse and improve them.
Even though it may not align with their incentives, platforms will comply because the law requires it. Some teens may refrain from trying, but many will likely try to work around it or move on to other forms of social media.
However, the level of verification – the quiet normalization of online identity checks – is likely to remain. This is how the Internet changes: gradually, randomly, and then all at once. And we see the early phase of this cycle unfolding before our eyes.
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