Australia – October 19, 2026 -- A study published this year found that four in five Australian teens under 16 got onto platforms barred by the country's 2024 social media ban. In an opinion piece, researchers Michal Luria, Aliya Bhatia and Danah Boyd argue that tightening enforcement would make kids and adults less safe online.
Bans are spreading, and so are workarounds
France joined Australia in July by barring under-15s from major platforms, though the country's top court blocked the ban on human rights grounds. The UK aims to bar under-16s in early 2027, and the EU has announced its own plan for under-15s. Teens in Australia have used a sibling's face for ID checks and even drawn fake facial hair.
Blocked kids may land in riskier places
The authors say that when kids cannot get onto the platforms they want, they often move to spaces with fewer guardrails. Some end up in Google Docs or podcast comment sections. Others land on platforms that leave them open to abuse and predation. Preliminary research from Australia shows screen time has not meaningfully dropped, and some of it has shifted to spaces parents cannot see.
Many parents also help their children get around the gates. Research from 2011 already showed parents teaching kids to evade Facebook's age limits.
Age checks put adults' data at risk
Some platforms track user activity to confirm age, which builds profiles that can be misused or leaked. Others ask for documents such as driver's licenses. Last year Discord reported that a third-party age-verification service, 5CA, was compromised, exposing at least 70,000 images of government IDs.
Efforts to stop circumvention have also targeted VPNs. Bills in Michigan and Utah tried to interfere with VPN privacy protections, and a federal court has blocked the Utah bill. Australia's eSafety Commissioner is nudging platforms to detect and block VPN use. The authors warn that this could endanger journalists and human rights defenders.
The alternative: limit data collection and hand families tools
The authors want policymakers to restrict the data companies collect to target content and features at all users, including children. They say nearly all the parents and teens they spoke with want such limits. They also back flexible, user-controlled tools. One example is keyword filtering, which lets a student block any post containing a nickname used to target them.
Luria and Bhatia work at the Center for Democracy & Technology. Boyd is a professor at Cornell University.