Australian under-16s still on social media to be 'booted off' as ban gets under way

Australia’s eSafety commissioner has said teenagers slipping through the cracks of the world-first social media ban will be “booted off” in time, after under-i6s boasted they were still on banned platforms in posts and comments on the prime minister’s accounts.

- Josh Taylor Daisy Dumas

As the ban got under way yesterday, some platforms were still allowing accounts registered for 14-year-olds.

Of the 10 platforms identified by Julie Inman Grant as needing to comply with the ban, Kick, Threads, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Tik-Tok and X would not allow accounts registered with a birth date of 11 January 2011. Twitch, Reddit and YouTube were still allowing such accounts to be registered as of yesterday morning, Guardian Australia found.

Inman Grant told the ABC yesterday afternoon the misses could be attributed to teething problems related to late implementation by some platforms.

“TikTok, X and Reddit were the last few companies that communicated to their user base, so I think that you can assume that they were a little bit behind on some of their deployments,” she said. The companies would be required to keep improving their implementation and those teens could “find themselves booted off at a later time”, she said.