Australian government releases framework for under-16 social media ban with age verification trial

The Australian government has released the results of its age assurance technology trial and confirmed it will proceed with legislation to ban children under 16 from social media platforms, with enforcement beginning in late 2025. The trial evaluated facial age estimation, document verification and other methods, finding that no single technology is fully accurate across all use cases. The legislation will place the compliance burden on platforms rather than parents and will be accompanied by privacy safeguards for the biometric and identity data required for age verification at scale.

Blanket age restrictions create structural trade-offs: they limit access for compliant users, risk displacing offenders to unmonitored channels, and require every user including adults to submit identity or biometric data to prove their age. Targeted detection that monitors for harm rather than for age avoids those costs. Guardii's anti-grooming, anti-sextortion and anti-CSAM filters operate silently within direct messages across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord and Roblox, identifying predatory patterns and escalation in real time and alerting the right authority when a child is at risk, addressing the underlying harms that motivate age-gating without restricting access or requiring universal identity verification.