Australian government not posturing with SMMA enforcement efforts: Wells

Australia’s move to put age restrictions on social media has spurred momentum on online safety regulations globally – and enthusiasm may be feeding back into the Australian political environment.

Reuters reports that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese may see the spotlight as an opportunity to ramp up enforcement, and frame the social media delay an Australian success story But the office of Communications Minister Anika Wells denied that global attention was dictating policy.

Comme ci, comme ça on compliance

Australia, which enacted its Social Media Minimum Age (SMMA) obligation in December 2025, recently published the first compliance report, which summarizes the work online regulator eSafety has done to date. So far, by numbers, the agency has issued 23 legally enforceable information-gathering notices, held 16 meetings with key platforms about their compliance, held 7 meetings with age assurance providers and experts, and surveyed 898 parents for its pulse research survey.

Moreover, the rule continues to have an impact on the enforcement side. As of mid-December, immediately following the imposition of the law, large social media platforms had removed around 4.7 million age-restricted accounts. According to the compliance report, “at the start of March 2026, over 310,000 additional age-restricted accounts were prevented from accessing platforms.”

Per the report, “as platforms now rightly move not just to removing accounts that existed prior to 10 December 2025 but also focus on new account creation, this new figure includes both accounts that existed pre 10 December 2025, that may not have been identified initially by platforms for a range of reasons including that they had a declared age of over 16, but also new accounts created and attempted to be created by under age users since 10 December 2025.”

Platforms are, statistically, keeping up their end of the bargain: “platform-led deactivation is the main reason children no longer had accounts on age-restricted social media platforms.” However, gaps remain, and overall the results are a mixed bag. In particular, some of the largest platforms have shown laxity; eSafety is “actively investigating potential non-compliance in relation to Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube.”

“Over the first three months, we have observed some good practices, and in some cases, platforms have made improvements as a result of engagement with eSafety,” says the report. “However, we have also identified a range of poor practices giving rise to compliance concerns and opportunities for improvement, which we have shared with relevant platforms and have strongly encouraged them to address.”

No other nasty social sites siphoning kids to the dark web

One noteworthy observation puts the lie to the fear that kids would jump ship to other, less regulated social media platforms; eSafety is “monitoring migratory patterns of social media use by children under the age of 16. As expected, there have been some short-term increases in downloads of some emerging apps, but we have not seen any significant migration to non-compliant platforms or other online services that are not required to comply with the SMMA obligation. We believe this is largely because the profusion of online services young people may be migrating to do not have a critical mass of their peers established on these smaller, less entrenched services.”

Article Topics

age verification  |  Australia  |  eSafety Commissioner  |  social media