More than 4.7 million social media accounts believed to belong to Australians under the age of 16 were blocked, removed or restricted in the days after Australia's world-first youth social media ban came into force, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said.
The ban, which took effect on 10 December, applies to major platforms including TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, X, Snapchat and Reddit. Following its introduction, the eSafety commissioner asked platforms to report how they were complying, revealing the scale of early enforcement.
While the government declined to publish platform-by-platform figures, Meta said it alone deactivated nearly 550,000 accounts across Facebook, Instagram and Threads. Albanese said early data suggested companies were actively preventing under-age users from accessing their services.
Ministers welcomed the figures as an early sign the law was having an impact, though they acknowledged enforcement would not be perfect from the outset. The communications minister, Anika Wells, said regulators would closely examine compliance and pursue platforms if teens shifted to unregulated alternatives.
Opposition figures, however, argued the ban was easy to bypass and said some removed accounts had already reappeared. The debate comes as other countries consider similar laws, even as new research from the UK questions whether social media use directly harms teenagers' mental health.