Meta removes 756,000 Australian under-16 accounts

Meta has deactivated 756,000 Facebook and Instagram accounts suspected of belonging to Australians under the age of 16 as enforcement of the country’s landmark social media restrictions intensifies.

The company said 462,000 Instagram accounts and 294,000 Facebook accounts were removed between the period immediately before the rules took effect in December 2025 and June 2026. The figures represent one of the clearest indications yet of the scale of enforcement required under Australia’s world-first minimum-age regime for social media accounts.

The restrictions came into force on December 10, 2025, requiring designated platforms to take reasonable steps to prevent Australians under 16 from creating or maintaining accounts. Facebook and Instagram are among the services covered, alongside TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, X, Threads, Twitch, Reddit and several other platforms.

Meta had previously disclosed that it removed 331,000 Instagram accounts and 173,000 Facebook accounts by January. The higher figures released this week show that enforcement continued through the first half of the year as the company expanded its age-detection systems.

Meta is using artificial intelligence and other age-assurance techniques to identify users who may be younger than they claim. Its systems can examine contextual signals from an account, including references to school grades, birthdays and other information that may indicate a user is below the minimum age.

Users identified as potentially underage may also be required to undergo additional verification. Photo-based age estimation has become one of the methods deployed across major platforms, alongside account-history analysis and other forms of age inference.

The company has also tightened its procedures for users whose accounts are removed. People whose accounts have been disabled for being underage are no longer given repeated opportunities to create replacement accounts through the same process, strengthening barriers against immediate circumvention.

Despite the large number of accounts removed, enforcement remains difficult. Government data and independent research have indicated that more than eight in 10 Australians under 16 continued to use social media during the first three months of the restrictions.

That gap has increased scrutiny of whether platforms are taking sufficient steps to prevent children from returning through new accounts, false birth dates or other workarounds. Research involving young users has also highlighted how quickly some teenagers learn to test and circumvent digital age controls.

Australia’s eSafety Commissioner has shifted from monitoring implementation to a more aggressive enforcement posture. The regulator has raised concerns over the compliance efforts of Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube and has been investigating possible breaches of the legislation.

Platforms can face substantial civil penalties if they fail to take reasonable measures to keep under-16 users from holding accounts. Australia has also moved to strengthen its enforcement framework, including plans to increase maximum penalties and expand the regulator’s powers to obtain information from technology companies.

The government argues that the restrictions are intended to reduce children’s exposure to potentially harmful design features, including recommendation systems and engagement mechanisms that encourage prolonged use. Officials have also cited concerns about mental health, harmful content and the pressures associated with maintaining social media profiles.

The legislation does not penalise children or their parents if an under-16 user accesses a restricted platform. Responsibility rests primarily with technology companies to demonstrate that they have taken appropriate steps to enforce the minimum age.

Meta has maintained that it supports the objective of providing safer online experiences for young people while questioning aspects of Australia’s approach. The company argues that age verification would work more consistently if a reliable age signal were established at the operating-system or app-store level rather than requiring individual platforms to repeatedly determine users’ ages.

Such an approach could allow age to be verified when a device is configured or an application is downloaded, potentially reducing inconsistencies between platforms. Privacy advocates, however, continue to scrutinise age-assurance systems because stronger verification can require the collection or processing of additional personal information.

Australia’s Age Assurance Technology Trial found that commercially available technologies could support minimum-age rules when appropriately deployed. Regulators have nevertheless stressed that no single technique is expected to provide a complete solution, placing greater emphasis on combinations of age estimation, inference and verification measures.