eSafety has put five major platforms on notice over Australia’s social media minimum-age rules, saying children under 16 are still maintaining accounts, opening new ones, or bypassing age checks despite early industry compliance efforts.
In its March 2026 compliance update, the regulator said it is now focusing investigations on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube, with decisions on possible enforcement action expected by mid-2026.
The update comes a little more than three months after the legislation took effect on 10 December 2025. eSafety said platforms had removed, deactivated or restricted a significant number of accounts, but “a substantial proportion” of under-16s continued to retain access.
What eSafety has found so far
According to the report, about 4.7 million age-restricted accounts were removed or restricted as of mid-December 2025. By the start of March 2026, more than 300,000 additional accounts had also been prevented from accessing age-restricted social media platforms.
eSafety stressed those figures relate to accounts, not individual users, and should not be treated as proof that a platform has complied with the law. Instead, the regulator said its assessment will turn on whether platforms have taken “reasonable steps” through their systems and processes.
That work has included 23 legally enforceable information-gathering notices across 10 platforms, along with platform meetings, desktop testing, public submissions and stakeholder engagement.
Parents still reporting under-age accounts
The report also draws on a pulse survey of 898 parents and carers of children aged eight to 15, conducted between 19 January and 2 February 2026. It found 49.7 per cent of surveyed parents said their child had an account on at least one platform before the restrictions took effect, falling to 31.3 per cent after implementation.
Even so, many children appear to have stayed on the major services. Among parents who said their child had an account before 10 December 2025, around seven in 10 reported their child still had an account on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok, while 48.5 per cent said their child still had an account on YouTube.
The most common reason parents gave for children retaining accounts was that the platform had not yet asked them to verify their age. eSafety also said it received more than 760 public submissions and enquiries in the first three months of the scheme.
Four main compliance concerns
The regulator outlined four key concerns in the update. These included some platforms that encouraged under-16 users to attempt age assurance, allowed repeated attempts at the same age-check method, made under-age reporting pathways difficult for parents, and failed to do enough to prevent new under-16 accounts from being created.
eSafety said some platforms appeared to rely too heavily on self-declared age at sign-up or had not applied stronger age-assurance checks near the time of account creation. It also raised concerns that some reporting systems were hard to access or required too much information from parents.
New rule narrows focus to harmful platform features
The report also noted that on 25 March 2026, the Minister for Communications registered a new legislative rule aimed at better targeting services with addictive or otherwise harmful design features. Under the new rule, platforms must also have a recommender feature or a logged-in feature, such as an endless feed, feedback, or time-limited functions, to fall within the definition.
eSafety said its assessment of the identified age-restricted platforms had not changed under the revised rule.
What happens next
If eSafety finds a platform has not taken reasonable steps, it can pursue a range of enforcement options, including infringement notices, enforceable undertakings and civil penalties of up to $49.5 million.
For now, the regulator says major reform will take time, but the message to platforms is sharpening: early progress has been made, yet significant gaps remain for Australian families.
Top image: Julie Inman Grant