Crikey reports that Australia's world-first under-16 social media ban — in force since December 2025 — is failing to deliver on its promise. Early evidence indicates that rather than removing children from harm, the prohibition is driving them onto VPNs, unregulated platforms and private messaging apps that sit beyond the reach of the very protections the law was sold on, while the mass age-verification required to enforce it imposes fresh privacy burdens on the entire population. On the available evidence the ban has displaced risk into less visible, less moderated channels — arguably leaving children harder to protect, not safer.
This was the predictable result of a blunt, authoritarian instrument imposed over the clear consensus of child-safety experts, who warned that walling children off from mainstream platforms does nothing to address predatory behaviour — it simply pushes it underground. Guardii, a world-leading AI online-safety platform and Meta Business Partner, is precisely the targeted, evidence-based alternative the Australian government disregarded: real-time detection of grooming, sextortion and child sexual abuse material inside children's direct messages across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, Roblox and other platforms, intercepting harm at the point of contact rather than excluding millions of young people from the internet. Where lawmakers chose prohibition and surveillance, Guardii offers prevention — protecting children exactly where abuse occurs, without the collateral damage of a sweeping ban that the early data suggests has backfired. The sound advice was available; it was ignored.
