Reluctant but compliant Snapchat, TikTok and Meta yield to social media ban

Snapchat, TikTok and Meta will comply with the government’s under-16 social media ban, confirming their capitulation during a tense senate inquiry in which TikTok was accused of intimidating a senator’s office for asking tough questions.

The platforms who failed to front an earlier inquiry this month, but had met with Communication Minister Anika Wells, told senators on Tuesday that they would not fight the ban, but that it would harm the wellbeing of young people locked out of the platforms.

“We will comply with the law, even though we believe it has been unevenly applied and risks undermining community confidence in the law,” Snap Inc’s senior vice president of global policy Jennifer Stout told the senate inquiry this morning.

“We know this will be difficult for young people who use Snapchat to communicate with their closest friends and family. For teens, connection and communication are strong drivers of happiness and wellbeing. Taking that away does not necessarily make them safer and it may instead push them towards other messaging services that lack Snapchat’s safety and privacy protections,” Stout said.

The world-first social media ban is set to come into effect on December 10, and will ban children under the age of 16 rom social media apps, forbidden to hold accounts on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat, X and YouTube.

Many platforms — including Snapchat and YouTube — have argued that they do not fall under the definition of social media and also warn that removing the privacy and safety guardrails tethered to accounts could expose children to harm online in sites with no controls.

Stout said that users spend two thirds of their time on Snapchat sending messages and making calls, and that the app should be excluded from the ban under existing carve outs for messaging services. “Snapchat is and has always been a messaging app,” she said.

Also fronting the inquiry via video link were Mia Garlick from Meta — the company behind Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — and TikTok’s Ella Woods-Joyce. Both confirmed their platforms were set to take down accounts held by those under the age of 16 from December 10.

“Under the law we’ll be deactivating accounts consistent with our compliance approach, it’s just, we’re still working through the precise machinations of that,” Garlick said.