Meta said this week it has removed more than 750,000 accounts in Australia it suspected belonged to users under 16, the company's biggest disclosure yet since the country's world-first teen social media ban took effect in December. Then there's the government's own data. More than 8 in 10 Australian children under 16 were still accessing banned platforms three months into the ban, according to figures from the country's internet regulator and multiple independent surveys.

That gap between the numbers platforms are willing to publish and the numbers regulators are finding on the ground is becoming the defining story of the global push to ban teens from social media. Laws are spreading fast. Almost nowhere have they actually kept kids offline.

Where the Bans Are Already in Place

Australia went first, barring anyone under 16 from holding accounts on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, X and several other platforms starting December 10. Eight months later, the country's eSafety Commissioner is still fighting an uphill battle. Kids get around the rules a few different ways. Plenty just lie about their age. Some get lucky when a platform's own age check guesses wrong. Others simply open a new account the moment an old one gets flagged.

Canberra responded by doubling the maximum fine for noncompliant platforms to roughly 99 million Australian dollars and giving regulators more power to demand internal company documents. Commissioner Julie Inman Grant has taken to arguing the law was never going to work overnight, saying the real impact will take years, not months, to show up.

Malaysia tried a different approach and ran into a different wall. Officials there planned to have platforms verify ages using government-issued identity cards, a stricter method than Australia's photo-based age estimation software. Tech companies balked, reportedly over concerns about storing sensitive government data, and Malaysia has now pushed its compliance deadline back to January 2027. In the meantime, nothing has changed, as many kids are still logging into social media platforms every day, using fake birthdates and all.

The pattern shows up almost everywhere a ban has actually gone live. The laws aren't doing nothing, Meta's takedown numbers keep climbing, but removals are happening slower than kids can open new accounts. And the platforms doing the removing are the same platforms with every incentive to slow-walk the process.

Who Is Considering a Ban Next

The list of countries weighing similar restrictions keeps growing. France became the first European country to pass age limits this year, championed personally by President Emmanuel Macron after he met with psychologist Jonathan Haidt, whose book on teen mental health has become required reading for policymakers worldwide. Britain is drafting legislation expected to reach Parliament this fall, modeled on Australia's law but going further by also banning livestreaming and stranger contact on apps like Discord and Roblox that Australia left untouched. Canada's proposed Bill C-34 would go further still, regulating chatbots and requiring harmful content to come down within 24 hours of being reported.

Beyond that trio, Brazil, Indonesia, Norway, Sweden, Greece, Spain and Vietnam have all either passed restrictions or have proposals moving through their legislatures. The European Commission is expected to weigh a bloc-wide proposal this fall, though a group of youth behavior researchers who advised the Commission has already warned against a blanket approach, arguing it could push kids toward less regulated corners of the internet instead of protecting them.

Why the U.S. Is Not Banning Anything

The United States is the one major holdout, and not for lack of political appetite. Protecting kids online is one of the few issues that unites lawmakers as different as Texas Senator Ted Cruz and California Governor Gavin Newsom.

But no outright ban has passed at the state or federal level, mostly because of the Constitution. Restricting a minor's access to lawful speech runs into First Amendment challenges that Australia and the UK simply do not have to deal with, and even LGBTQ+ advocacy groups have pushed back on outright bans, arguing social media is often where isolated teenagers find community.

California came closest. State lawmakers led by Democratic Assemblymember Josh Lowenthal drafted a strict Australia style ban, then pulled back this year to a narrower version that keeps under-16s on apps like Instagram and TikTok but forces platforms to switch off addictive features such as infinite scroll and autoplay for younger users. Lowenthal has said he expects other countries to eventually copy that model instead.

In Congress, the closest thing to momentum is the Kids Off Social Media Act, which would bar accounts for children under 13 and ban algorithmic recommendations for anyone under 17. It has been introduced before without passing. Instead, the real American pressure campaign is happening in courtrooms. State attorneys general have filed a wave of lawsuits against Meta, Google and Roblox using a legal strategy borrowed from the 1990s tobacco cases.

A California jury already found Meta and YouTube liable for designing addictive products for kids. A New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay 567 million dollars this month, on top of a 375 million dollar verdict in March. Behind the scenes, Meta has been lobbying Congress for legislation that would grant platforms broader legal protection instead.

That split, ban the kids abroad, sue the platforms at home, sums up where this fight stands right now. Both approaches share the same unresolved problem. Nobody has yet figured out how to verify a stranger's age online without either trusting a company's algorithm to guess or a government database to hold the answer, and so far kids have proven better at outrunning both.