Meta Begins Early Purge of Under-16 Australian Accounts Ahead of 10 Dec Social-Media Ban

States have long intervened to shield minors from newly dominant media—U.S. radio licences in the 1934 Communications Act barred children from certain broadcasts, and COPPA (1998) banned U-13 data collection online. Australia’s 2025 move echoes those episodes but goes further by excluding minors entirely, foreshadowing a more muscular sovereignty over borderless platforms. The policy rides two intersecting mega-trends: mounting evidence (and moral panic) around adolescent mental-health harm from algorithmic feeds, and governments’ search for workable age-verification in an age of deepfakes and digital IDs. Whether the law endures or fizzles, it tests the feasibility of enforcing age-gating at national scale and may accelerate the splintering of the global internet into jurisdiction-specific rule-sets—a dynamic that, over a 100-year horizon, could matter as much as the breakup of the Bell System or the 1995 EU Data-Protection Directive in defining who controls the architecture of human communication.