Australia gears up for world’s 1st social media ban for under-16s

Darcey Pritchard, 15, deleted Snapchat off her phone about a year ago when she felt sucked in by its algorithm.

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Her friend Luca Hagop, also 15, recently spent more than 34 hours on Instagram in one week, sharing pet videos and other reels “so random, they’re funny because they’re so unfunny.”

Amelie Tomlinson, 14, keeps up with her friends on Snapchat, and until recently, had almost no one’s phone number.

Her friend Jasmine Bentley, 15, is not allowed on any social media but dreams of being a content creator.

The two sets of friends, living in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne, Australia, offer a small window into the wildly different relationships today’s teens have with social media. But they are united on one front: They do not think a new Australian law that bars children under 16 from having social media accounts, which takes effect on Wednesday, will change their lives much.

Australia passed the law a year ago, setting itself up to be a test case for what many parents say feels like this generation’s Sisyphean task — shielding children from the risks associated with social media until they are capable of navigating it responsibly.

But these teenagers, born around the same time that Instagram and Snapchat were first released, are digital natives. Most know how to use virtual private networks, which may help them evade the ban. Many fudged their ages when they first signed up, to get around the minimum age of 13 for many social media services. Others have used their parents’ information to get accounts, or have older siblings whose identities they can co-opt.