Has Australia’s social media ban for under-16s been a success? Here are the results.

Enforcement would “target systemic failures, after rigorous investigation”, an eSafety spokesperson said last week. It is expected that “isolated cases of teenage creativity” will continue to circumvent the ban for a little while.

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“We know there’s more work to do, and the eSafety Commissioner is looking closely at this data to determine what it shows in terms of individual platforms’ compliance,” Communications Minister Anika Wells said in a statement released with the topline figures.

“We’ve said from the beginning that we weren’t expecting perfection straight away – but early figures are showing this law is making a real, meaningful difference.”

Fifteen-year-old Bella, from regional Victoria, had already signed up to Facebook, Instagram and TikTok with a fake age, and was waiting to be sprung.

“I was just going to wait and see what happened and see if I needed to do any workarounds. But … I was never kicked off,” she said.

Bella withheld her surname from this story, worried her accounts would be deactivated. She communicates with her close friends through text messages, but some of her wider circle have had their social media accounts deactivated. She doesn’t have their phone numbers, so they’ve lost contact.

Fourteen-year-old Elliott, from Sydney, was kicked off Snapchat on December 10. Most of his friends aged under 16, he claims, weren’t asked by the platform to verify their age. They could still access it, and all the group chats he was booted from.

“It’s harder to make plans to go out with other friends that you don’t have their numbers,” Elliott said. Though, he did start to spend more time outdoors, fishing and hanging out with the close friends whose phone numbers he did have.

After a month, he claims, he was able to sign up to Snapchat again with a new email address.

In early December, Melbourne mother Michelle Stamper discovered a “flurry of activity” during a routine check of her 13-year-old’s text messages: teens sending their phone numbers to one another for the first time.

But, as it turns out, Stamper’s daughter and her friends did not need to exchange numbers. Many of them fooled Snapchat’s facial age estimation scans – an age-assurance method known to be faulty – and could still use the popular platform.

Stamper is annoyed that she had been obliged to report her daughter’s still-live account to Snapchat, which deactivated the account weeks later after it was contacted by this masthead. (Stamper says her daughter was back on the platform within 24 hours.)

“I’m miffed,” she says. “I was relying on the government to clean it up for the kids.”

If you or anyone you know needs support, call Lifeline on 13 11 14, Beyond Blue on 1800 512 348, Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800.

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