Meta says it has deactivated 756,000 Facebook and Instagram accounts in Australia that appeared to belong to under-16s to comply with the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024.

The figures include more than 500,000 accounts Meta removed across Facebook and Instagram before the law came into force in December last year, along with those it has blocked since. That includes 462,000 suspect Instagram accounts and 294,000 suspect Facebook accounts. The company did not disclose the number of underage Threads accounts it has removed, if any.

“Enforcement is ongoing, and these numbers will continue to grow. We report our enforcement to the eSafety Commissioner and will continue to publish updates periodically in order to be transparent with the public,” Meta said.

The statement comes amid reports that Australia’s internet regulator was probing Meta’s Instagram and Facebook, Google’s YouTube, Snapchat and TikTok for possible breaches of the law. The regulator was considering filing a lawsuit against them for alleged non-compliance. In June, Australia said it would double the maximum penalty for social media companies that fail to comply with its under-16 ban to 99 million AUD.

Social media apps banned for under-16s in Australia include Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, X, YouTube, Reddit and streaming apps Kick, Twitch and Lemon8. Barring Meta, no other company has publicly released compliance data of this scale.

Meta is using AI to analyse profiles. This includes posts, comments, bios and captions. The company says it is monitoring profiles for “contextual clues” that an account may belong to an under-16 user, such as birthday celebrations or mentions of school grades.

• Parents and others can report a suspected underage account, both in apps and through the Help Centre for Facebook and Instagram. Reports of underage accounts are then reviewed by AI, too.

• The company says its systems can now detect and prevent users from creating a new account after their previous account was removed. It did not say what recourse users have if its systems wrongfully flag them as under-16 or whether teenagers are still able to bypass its age verification systems.

Meta bats for Play Store-level age verification: Meta raised concerns that tech giants are not taking a consistent approach to how to boot teens off their platforms.

“Our primary concern is that platforms are not taking a consistent approach to how they are removing teens. There should be a single reliable age signal delivered at the operating system or app store level. Age could be verified once, when a young person sets up their device or downloads an app, rather than repeatedly across the dozens of apps they use,” Meta said.

How OS-level age verification might work: During MediaNama’s May 15 roundtable discussion in Bengaluru on ‘Age verification and restricting social media for children’, a speaker also argued for pushing enforcement to the OS level from the point of device manufacture. “If you’re buying a new device for a minor, you need to have an age-based token granted to that child. At the OS level, you hash out any application or website access a child should not be accessing,” they said. The speaker further added that the government should regulate hardware manufacturers to build this in.

“I don’t need DigiLocker. It’s already solved as a problem. And it is solved by a problem by a better technology implementation than anything coming out of India,” said the speaker, arguing for OS-level solutions over identity verification.

Nikhil Pahwa, founder and editor of MediaNama, noted that both Apple and Google’s app stores are considering building parental controls into the OS. He listed telecom operator checks are among the mechanisms being considered. “Children don’t necessarily have their own SIM card. There is multi-SIM and multi-account usage, so you can’t use mobile numbers anyway. Telecom operators get more money when they do verification, they get money for every verification they do,” he said.

Concerns around privacy remain: India is also moving towards restricting children’s access to social media. Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh have announced age-based bans. Goa is examining similar measures, and the central government is preparing a graded framework with three age brackets: 8–12, 12–16, and 16–18. However, concerns remain about surveillance and the extent of such bans.

During the MediaNama discussion, speakers repeatedly raised concerns over how age verification at scale may lead to online surveillance of everyone, not just children.

MediaNama’s founder-editor argued that age verification systems cannot function without verifying everyone who uses a service.

“To verify who’s a child, they’ll have to verify everyone who’s using a service. Once that verification mechanism comes in, it will be used for everything,” said Nikhil Pahwa.

He added that social media would likely only be the beginning. “I’m sure gaming and AI will be the first to be included after social media is,” he said. “I see that as the first step in a longer direction of bringing age verification to everyone’s usage of the internet and age verification for almost everything on the internet.”

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