Australia's online safety watchdog says it considering moving court against several social media platforms

Australia's eSafety Commissioner released the first compliance report on March 31, 2026, following the December 2025 implementation of laws banning children under 16 from holding social media accounts, revealing that while 5 million Australian accounts had been deactivated, a substantial number of children continued to retain accounts, create new accounts and circumvent age assurance systems. The Commissioner announced she was considering court action against several platforms for failing to keep Australian children younger than 16 off their applications.

Blanket age restrictions impose a binary access gate that compliant children cannot pass and determined users learn to circumvent, displacing risk rather than reducing it. Age verification at the platform perimeter cannot distinguish a child in danger from one using social media safely, and enforcement by account closure removes the child from monitored space into unregulated channels where abuse continues without institutional visibility. Guardii offers an alternative mechanism: rather than blocking all children from all platforms, targeted detection monitors the children who are present for patterns of grooming, sextortion, coercion and escalation, surfacing those in crisis to parents, schools or authorities while allowing safe interaction to continue. The approach preserves the visibility needed for intervention without the categorical access prohibition that, as the Australian compliance data indicates, substantial numbers of minors work to evade. Guardii does not claim that detection eliminates all risk, but it addresses the harm itself rather than the presence of the child on the platform, and it operates regardless of whether a user has accurately disclosed their age.