Australia’s government said it will introduce draft legislation to double the maximum fine for social media platforms to A$99 million (about US$68 million) when they fail to take reasonable steps to keep Australian children under 16 off their services, roughly twice the A$49.5 million cap in place since the ban took effect in December 2025.
The bill would also expand the powers of eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, the country’s online safety regulator, allowing her office to demand information and documents from platforms—and, for the first time, from third parties such as the age-assurance technology vendors the companies rely on—to test claims about how minors are slipping past the restrictions.
The tougher measures follow evidence that the landmark ban has fallen well short in practice. The eSafety office reported in March that seven in 10 children who held accounts on restricted platforms as of December 10 were still on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok months later, suggesting age checks were being widely circumvented.
Inman Grant said in April that she was weighing court action against those platforms and against YouTube, alleging they were not taking reasonable steps to exclude underage users. The new powers to compel records from age-verification providers are aimed squarely at the platforms’ defense that the technology, not their compliance, is to blame.
The government paired the enforcement push with early data it says shows the policy is working where it sticks. Since the law began, it reported, about 30% of children are playing more sport, 27% are getting better sleep, online bullying has fallen, and minors are encountering less inappropriate content—figures officials used to argue the ban’s goals justify tighter rules.
More than five million accounts belonging to under-16s have been deactivated or removed since the law took effect, according to the government, a scale of intervention without precedent among democracies and one that platforms had warned would be technically difficult and prone to error.
Australia’s approach has made it a global test case. The European Union, the United Kingdom, and a number of U.S. states have floated or enacted age-related restrictions on social media, and regulators in those jurisdictions are watching whether Canberra can make its ban bite without sweeping in adults or driving children to harder-to-monitor corners of the internet.
The legislation is expected to be debated when Parliament returns, and the platforms—which have not detailed their response to the latest proposal—are likely to contest both the size of the penalties and the demand that they open up their age-verification systems to the regulator.