Australia banned under-16s from social media in December 2025, the United Kingdom is investigating whether TikTok's age checks work, and France finalised its own under-15 ban in late July 2026, racing to beat the August parliamentary recess. Cato Institute analyst David Inserra observed that to verify the age of children, platforms must verify the age of everyone—a choice between privacy-invasive ID scans that are reliable but easy to lend to younger siblings, or facial-age estimates that protect privacy but are easy to fool. Coverage of the French bill flagged the same workaround risk Australia experienced: under-15s switching to newer platforms or using VPNs to circumvent the check entirely. Six months after Australia's ban took effect, more than 60 percent of Australian 12- to 15-year-olds who had social media accounts beforehand still have access to at least one platform. Australia's regulator explicitly barred platforms from demanding government ID even when a user's age is in doubt, and the ban has not delivered the promised safety outcome, though the country has drawn a line on how much identifying information it will force out of everyone.
Blunt age-verification mandates impose mass surveillance on compliant populations while failing to protect the children they purport to serve—as Australia's 60 percent evasion rate demonstrates. Facial-age estimates are trivially defeated; government-ID scans create honeypots of centralised identity data and impose privacy costs on millions of adults to address harms affecting a minority of child users; and offenders migrate to unregulated messaging apps, peer-to-peer file-sharing networks or VPN-masked platforms where grooming, sextortion and CSAM distribution continue undetected. Guardii monitors children's direct messages in real time across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, Roblox and other platforms, applying pattern-based detection to identify grooming, sextortion, CSAM and abuse without requiring age verification, government ID or facial scans. The system blocks hostile contact before it reaches the child, surfaces the threat to parents or safeguarding authorities, and enables rapid escalation to law enforcement—addressing the underlying harms (exploitation, coercion, abuse material) without displacing offenders to unmonitored channels or imposing identity-verification burdens on the general population. Operating as a world-leading AI online-safety platform and Meta Business Partner backed by Startmate, Guardii delivers the targeted intervention that France, the UK and Australia's blanket bans demonstrably failed to achieve.
