Australia’s social media ban for under-16s introduced in December 2025 may well be seen in time as a watershed moment, similar to Ireland’s 2004 smoking ban.
However, just six months after Australian communications minister Anika Wells told 10 platforms – including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat – to restrict access to under-16s, there have been mixed reports about how well it is working in practice.
Some teenagers have managed to use workarounds, or decamped to social media platforms not covered by the ban, or exploited weaknesses in age verification systems.
Nonetheless, the measure’s greatest efficacy may lie not in its operation, but in the jolt it gave governments across the globe.
Alex Cooney, chief executive of the online safety group CyberSafeKids, is in no doubt the sluice gates have been thrown open by Wells.
“It immediately generated a conversation among other governments who then started saying: ‘Gosh, should we think the same thing?’” she says.
“Australia was the first country that said there was something wrong with this model, that social media was not wholly beneficial to children.”
One Government member who was immediately enthused by the idea was Minister for Communications Patrick O’Donovan.
At a press conference on December 10th, the day the ban came into effect, he was scathing of the EU’s efforts at online child protection, calling them “tiresome” and a “failure”. He complained about the “clunkiness” of the European Commission’s attempts to deal with the issue.
O’Donovan vowed he wanted 2026 to be “the year of the protection of the child online”, both in Ireland and in Europe, during Ireland’s presidency of the Council of the EU in the second half of the year. He promised that if the EU did not act, Ireland would forge ahead on its own.
O’Donovan was not alone.
By early 2026, 13 other EU countries had pledged to introduce similar bans: Denmark, France (due to start in September), Spain, Italy, Portugal, Austria, Luxembourg, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Belgium, Finland and Greece. The UK, Norway and Switzerland have also announced similar bans based on age.
Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez described the platforms as “failed states” where laws were ignored, crimes were tolerated, and children are exposed to addiction and pornography.
“We will protect them from the digital wild west,” said Sánchez.
There have been some holdouts in the EU, mainly Estonia, which argue for regulation rather than bans.
Politically, there is a perception that the European Union’s main legislative tool, the Digital Services Act (DSA), has not been effective enough in curbing social media platforms from providing harmful content, especially to younger people. Enforcement is slow and action is left to the companies, in other words relying on voluntary self-regulation.
The European Commission has made recent preliminary findings that Facebook, Instagram and TikTok are addictive by design. In its findings on online video sharing network TikTok, it stated that addictive features included infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications, and its highly personalised recommender system.
Social media companies deny their platforms, driven by recommender algorithms – directing users towards particular content, some of which is harmful or inappropriate – are addictive. Meta and TikTok have appealed the decisions.
Mary Aiken, professor of cyberpsychology at the University of East London and a global authority on this issue, says the current system has failed to protect children because tech companies have ignored their obligations.
“If you’re a child of seven or eight in Ireland, if you’re a four-year-old, you can access these platforms,” she says.
She says the responsibility of tech companies to restrict content for under-13s “has been in place since day one” but it has never been enforced.
Similar to other EU ministers, O’Donovan was frustrated at the slow pace of making these global companies meet their obligations to younger people and children. He vowed to go it alone if the EU was too tardy in acting.
Documents released to The Irish Times under a Freedom of Information Act request show how his ambition of getting an age verification tool up and running by the end of June was not realised.
Securing a foolproof method to verify the age of the user is absolutely vital for any restrictions to work. In Ireland, it will be delivered as part of a “digital wallet”, which will allow digital identification across a wide range of services.
O’Donovan wrote to Minister for Public Expenditure Jack Chambers, who is developing the digital wallet, on March 5th emphasising the urgency of the issue and pointing out the aim was to pilot an age verification tool during the first half of the year.
Chambers replied that other things needed to happen before an age verification tool could be introduced: public consultation, pilot testing and legislation.
A more realistic goal was the end of the year, he indicated.
In the meantime, the European Commission finally moved on the issue.
On Monday, the commission published a report from an expert group saying social media should be banned for those under 13 with graduated restrictions up to the age of 16. Commission president Ursula von der Leyen promised legislation by the autumn.
Why after so many years of inaction was the debate happening now and with urgency?
Aiken cites mounting evidence of the harm caused by online material and access, along with successful legal actions against Meta and YouTube in the US, as factors that moved the dial.
“We had a strong cohort of what I call technophile academics, along with vested interests, that have argued against these restrictions over time,” she says.
“They should be ashamed of themselves, when we now consider the body of evidence of online harm and how it has affected two generations, the impact on children’s wellbeing, on their attention, on their sleep, on their body image, on their emotional development, and then segueing into the whole area of online harm, and algorithms amplifying additional existing harmful content: self-harm, eating disorders, misogyny, extreme content and hard-core pornography.”
Cooney of CyberSafeKids says the minimum age restriction is widely ignored in the industry but, in addition to that, she argues the feature on sites pose the biggest problems.
“Instagram Teens is a good example. It was introduced post-DSA as a safe alternative,” she says.
“There’s still a recommender algorithm within that model. As far as we can tell, there’s still that ability to get around age restrictions.
“It is the features that are the problem: addictive design features or the recommender algorithm churning out inappropriate content, sending them down rabbit holes,” says Cooney.
“These companies should not get access to children with these products unless they can prove that they’re safe,” she says, adding that something similar to the film classification system might be a model to follow.
Aiken says that some of these features can be compared to what you would find in a casino.
“If you think of Instagram or TikTok, effectively that’s a slot machine. It is even manifest in infinite scroll, because scrolling top to bottom is actually more addictive than scrolling left and right, which is what these companies have discovered,” she says.
Social media companies dispute that their products are addictive.
Richard Collard of TikTok told a hearing of the Oireachtas justice committee in May that its product was not designed to be addictive.
“That is why we have introduced a number of restrictions and frictions in our systems. We have a 60-minute screen time limit by default for everyone under 18 on the platform,” he told the committee.
“This means that if you are a teen using TikTok and you are scrolling and reach that 60 minutes, there is a full screen takeover and you are expected to enter a code to continue using the platform.”
Most EU countries and the UK seem to be aiming for a ban for under-16s similar to Australia’s, going further than the EU’s expert group’s report on Monday that placed the minimum age at 13.
Aiken favours the EU group’s approach, believing the blanket ban for under-16s is too blunt a tool.
“There should be no social media for under-13s. They are not developmentally mature enough to engage with social media, and particularly that enhanced by algorithmic profiling,” she says.
“The EU is moving in a direction that I would be very supportive of, of staging access to social media in an age-appropriate way.”
For Aiken, those aged between 13 and 15 should have graduated access with very strong safeguards in place, with some safeguards in place for those between the ages of 16 and 18.
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O’Donovan has made child online safety a central plank of his own role during the EU presidency. In September he is convening a high-level conference on online safety, with a view to defying the union’s “clunkiness” and pushing through restrictions by year’s end.
If that’s not possible, it’s likely Ireland and a dozen other EU countries will each go it alone, with variations of the blanket ban for under-16s, pioneered by Australian minister Anika Wells.