Meta & YouTube Start Removing Under-16 Users as Australia’s Social Media Ban Enters Final Week

Age-gating media is not new—think of the 1954 US Comics Code or Britain’s 1984 ‘video nasties’ crackdown—but Australia is now applying a Prohibition-style blanket rule to social media rather than content. The move sits at the intersection of a decades-long trend toward state paternalism online (from the 1996 US Communications Decency Act to the EU’s 2018 GDPR age checks) and the tech giants’ waning political clout. Whether the ban curbs harm or merely drives teens to VPN-enabled “speakeasy” apps will shape global regulation: Malaysia and parts of the EU are already signalling copy-cat laws. On a century horizon this moment tests how societies balance childhood protection, free expression and digital identity infrastructure—issues likely to define citizenship in algorithmic states far beyond today’s headline about 16-year-olds losing their Instagram feeds.