By Finn Brooks
https://apnews.com/article/australia-social-media-ban-children-58c50c845d96057b39529e988bd778bc
Australia made history on December 10, 2024, when it became the first country in the world to legally ban children under 16 from holding social media accounts — and the opening months of enforcement have been anything but smooth. According to the Associated Press, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant released the country’s first compliance report this week, revealing that while 5 million Australian accounts had been deactivated, a significant number of children continue to hold accounts, create new ones, and successfully bypass age assurance systems. Her office now has “significant concerns” about five major platforms — Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube — and is actively gathering evidence for potential court action. With fines reaching up to $33 million Australian dollars for systemic noncompliance, the stakes are high — and the world is watching.
Through a realist IR lens, this story is fundamentally about the reassertion of state sovereignty over digital space. For decades, major social media platforms have operated as quasi-stateless actors — accumulating enormous structural power while resisting national regulation by arguing that the internet transcends borders. Australia’s law is a direct challenge to that model. Communications Minister Anika Wells put it bluntly, accusing the platforms of deliberately doing the bare minimum because they want the law to fail — not just in Australia, but globally. This is a classic power struggle between a state actor and a set of non-state corporate actors with enormous economic and technological leverage. The platforms’ half-hearted compliance — such as allowing unlimited age verification attempts and prompting underage users to try again after self-identifying as minors — reflects a calculated strategy to exhaust regulatory enforcement rather than genuinely submit to it.
From a liberal institutionalist perspective, Australia’s experiment carries enormous international implications. Minister Wells noted that a dozen countries have already moved to follow Australia’s lead since December 10, making Australian enforcement a bellwether for a global regulatory cascade. If the courts uphold the law and force meaningful platform compliance, it signals to every other government that digital sovereignty is achievable, that states retain the capacity to impose binding obligations on even the most powerful tech corporations. If the platforms successfully water down enforcement through legal challenges, Reddit and the Digital Freedom Project have both filed constitutional challenges arguing the law infringes on implied freedom of political communication, it will embolden platforms worldwide to resist similar legislation elsewhere. The outcome of the Australian High Court’s preliminary hearing in May will therefore reverberate far beyond Melbourne.
Australia is acting as what constructivists would call a norm entrepreneur, attempting to establish a new global standard for how states relate to digital platforms and protect minors online. The resistance from platforms like Meta and TikTok is not just legal maneuvering; it is a structural defense of a world order in which private technological infrastructure operates above the reach of democratic governance. The expert quoted in the article cuts to the core tension: if age assurance technology is inherently imperfect, who bears responsibility — the state, the platform, or the limitations of technology itself? That question has no clean answer, but Australia has decided someone must be held accountable. Whether the courts agree will determine not just the fate of this law, but the future relationship between democratic states and the platforms that increasingly mediate public life.