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On 10 December 2025, Australia became the first country in the world to ban children under 16 from social media.

The new law requires platforms to take “reasonable steps” to deactivate existing accounts for under-16s and prevent the creation of new ones, or face fines of up to A$49.5 million (£25 million) for serious or repeated breaches.

The law prohibits under-16s from a number of sites whose “sole or a significant purpose is to enable online social interaction”, including Facebook, X, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Reddit. YouTube Kids, Google Classroom and messaging apps like WhatsApp are not included.

The ban has been a talking point in the UK since its initial proposal, with educators, parents and politicians alike wondering if a similar approach could work here.

Last month, MPs voted against introducing a blanket ban, although a three-month government consultation on restricting access is now underway. Meanwhile, , including Greece, Spain and France, have all made moves toward introducing their own restrictions.

Australia’s social media ban: the impact

It’s now several weeks into the new Australian school year, so all eyes are on the country and the impact of the law so far.

But to understand the mood in Australian schools now, you need to understand what staff were dealing with before, says Rob Barugh, director of learning technology at independent boys’ school Hale School, near Perth.

Having worked in education for decades, he has observed social media’s arrival and subsequent development into an overwhelming force.

“Back in its infancy, 10 years or so ago, schools were very quick to say, ‘That’s happening off campus, it’s not our responsibility,’” he says. “But the schools that were not trying to bury their heads in the sand were very quick to realise that things that happened off campus quickly came on to campus.”

What followed were years of incidents, he explains, which will no doubt sound familiar to UK teachers: inappropriate images shared between pupils, photographs of girls circulated without consent, police being called in and even AI-generated deepfakes.

“Pastoral staff were swamped with issues that, when you drilled down into them, were adolescent misuse of social media,” says Barugh.

Strong views from young people

Belinda Hudak, president of the Victorian Association of State Secondary Principals and until recently head of a large government secondary school in Victoria, paints a similar picture.

“The biggest [issue] was extortion, kids being targets of scams and extortion at low and high levels, which was having a really negative impact on young people and their lives,” she recalls.

So when the federal government announced the ban, the reaction was largely one of relief, she says. There was broad support from staff, although some had understandable questions about how they would be required to ensure the law was followed.

“School leaders didn’t want to be the ones enforcing it; we were very clear that this was not our role to implement,” Hudak explains. “But we really welcome it.”

The student reaction, meanwhile, was mixed but not mutinous.

“The 14 to 15 age group was probably most outraged, because they had access and had been engaged with social media for longer,” Hudak says. “And there were sensible arguments from young people, saying that’s where they access news and information, they’re not just scrolling through scary body image things. There were some really strong views from young people on that.”

But the law passed nonetheless. And so what has actually changed, now that it is in place? The honest answer seems to be that it’s still early days, says Hudak.

“The ban hasn’t suddenly made a massive difference overnight,” she explains. “We haven’t seen a huge number of young people being suddenly thrown off their social media.”

Nobody is pretending the ban is impenetrable. Hudak’s own 14-year-old daughter told her that two of her friends had been removed from platforms, but simply deleted the app, logged back in through a browser and were back on within minutes.

Indeed, recent polling by the Molly Rose Foundation found that who had accounts on restricted social media platforms before the ban came into force still have access to one or more of those accounts.

Meanwhile, an investigation in January found that while platforms had belonging to under-16s in the first month of the ban (more than two accounts for every Australian aged 10 to 16), researchers cautioned that the figure may be misleading.

Many teenagers hold multiple accounts across platforms, and it remains unclear whether risky behaviour is being reduced or simply migrating elsewhere.

Some commentators have also raised concerns around the platforms that the ban doesn’t cover, including gaming sites like Roblox, Discord and Steam, where young people are routinely interacting online with strangers.

‘Our position is to take the physical smartphone away; the Nokia 3210 has probably never had a better year’

With these concerns in mind, one way to keep teenagers off social media is, of course, to simply take their phones away.

Most Australian states had already , with the first bans being implemented in 2020. Barugh’s school has gone further than the national law by implementing its own policy, asking families not to purchase smartphones at all for pupils in Year 7, a policy extended this year to Year 8 after 85 per cent of parents backed it in a survey.

“Our position is to take the physical smartphone away,” he explains. “A lot of schools in Australia are now on board with that, pushing parents en masse to delay the purchase and promoting what we call the ‘retro dumb phone’.” The Nokia 3210, he notes, has probably never had a better year.

Having fewer phones in pupils’ hands has, Barugh says, led to a significant reduction in social media-related behavioural incidents for pastoral staff to deal with. And while the hope might be that a social media ban would reduce that further, he remains realistic about the workarounds available to young people.

“There are ways around it, particularly via school laptops; they can use VPNs and access social media that way,” he says. “The difference is they don’t have their laptop in their pocket 24 hours a day. It’s not something they can just whip out and scroll through while they’re waiting for a bus.”

Children less likely to report harm

Hudak, meanwhile, raises another concern that deserves close attention: the risk that pupils who know they’re not supposed to be on platforms become less likely to report harm when it occurs there.

“That’s probably the biggest worry for us,” she says. “If they know they’re not supposed to be on [social media], but then terrible things are happening to them on it, are they going to still report? You never want a young person to feel like they can’t come forward.”

Schools therefore need to ensure that young people “know they can speak to trusted adults in their lives, including their schools, if they have concerns”, without worrying about getting into more trouble, she adds.

This is also a concern for Barugh and his staff. “We’re really mindful of it,” he says. “We’ve been very clear that our priority is pupil wellbeing, not punishment. If something happens online, even if it involves a breach of the rules, we want young people to come forward knowing they’ll be supported first.”

He adds that the school has put a lot of effort into making sure there are safe and trusted ways for pupils to reach out, through pastoral staff, year coordinators and school psychologists, as well as creating a dedicated “calm, non-judgemental space where boys can step away, reset and have a quiet conversation if they need to”.

‘The ban gives families moral backing and schools stronger language in discussions about social media’

And Hudak says that a key benefit of the ban is that it empowers parents in having their own conversations with young people around social media use and staying safe online - meaning that less of the weight of this work ultimately falls to schools.

“It gives parents a way to say, ‘Actually, no, you’re not supposed to have this. It’s not just a rule I, as a parent, have made up.’ For some families, that’s genuinely important,” she explains.

Jeremy Stowe-Lindner, principal of Bialik College in Melbourne, agrees with this, explaining that the ban “gives families moral backing [and] schools stronger language” in discussions about social media.

But he believes the true power of the new law lies in the role it plays on a national level, as a tool for Australia to hold social media companies to account. “It forces platforms to take responsibility,” he says.

Support for the social media ban remains high

The hope is that having a more regulated online space will, in theory, make it easier for schools and families to keep children safe online.

“It’s not a magical wand,” Hudak cautions. “But it might just delay and push back so that we don’t have primary school pupils scrolling through content that we know is quite unregulated.”

So, while the law clearly isn’t perfect, support for it remains high - with research at the end of last year finding that , rising to 91 per cent among high school teachers.

“Of course, there are going to be people getting around it, but that doesn’t stop you from putting the law in place. We should keep reminding ourselves that we can push back, we don’t have to be dictated to by a few billionaires in Silicon Valley,” Barugh says.

Hudak agrees: “I think we all have a bit of faith that over time it will make a bigger difference.”

Zofia Niemtus is a freelance writer