Millions of accounts were registered in Australia as belonging to children, according to the country, since the nation prohibited the usage of the websites by persons under 16, authorities said.

Anika Wells, a communications minister, said on Friday that they were staring down anyone who claimed it could not be done, some of the largest and most wealthy companies in the world, and their followers. Now, Australian parents can be assured that their children can enjoy their childhood.

The numbers, which the Australian government had announced on 10 social media channels, were the first to reflect the magnitude of the historic ban since it was implemented in December, in concern about the impact of the detrimental online space on youths. The legislation elicited controversial discussions in Australia regarding the use of technology, privacy, child safety, and overall mental health, and has stimulated other nations to think of such a policy.

The officials reported that the figure was encouraging.

However, according to the Australian law, Facebook, Instagram, Kick, Reddit, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, X, YouTube, and Twitch are fined up to 49.5 million Australian dollars, that is, 33.2 million dollars, in case they do not make reasonable efforts to take down the accounts of Australian children under the age of 16. This does not apply to messaging services like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

To prove age, the platform may ask account holders to provide copies of identification, may apply age estimation technology to a face of an account holder using a third party, or may infer age based on the information already available to the platform, e.g., how long a person has had an account.

The eSafety Commissioner of the country, Julie Inman Grant, said that approximately 2.5 million Australians aged 8 to 15 years old had social media accounts, and previous estimates indicated that 8- to 12-year-old children had 84% of them. The number of accounts held on the 10 platforms was not known, but Inman Grant indicated that the 4.7 million “deactivated or restricted” number was a positive one.

Inman Grant said, “We are not allowing predatory social media corporations into the lives of our children.”

The top 10 companies that were subject to the ban were in compliance with it and had submitted the figures on removal to the regulator in Australia in time, the commissioner stated. She also stated that social media companies were supposed to switch their focus to not only implementing the ban but also not allowing children to make new accounts and avoiding the ban.

Meta removed 550,000 accounts

Australian authorities did not segregate the numbers per platform. However, Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, said this week that it had deleted almost 550,000 accounts of its users who were known to be under the age of 16 by the day the ban took effect.

In the blog post disclosing the numbers, Meta criticized the ban and remarked that smaller platforms that the ban does not impact may not prioritize safety. The firm further observed that browsing mediums would continue to show children content following the algorithms – an issue that guided the implementation of the ban.

Among parents and child safety campaigners, the law was very popular. It was opposed by online privacy activists and certain teenage lobby groups, the latter basing their argument on the fact that there were people who felt safe online, and in other cases, teens were geographically isolated in the expansive countryside of Australia.

Others claimed to have been able to outwit age-assessing technology or had been assisted by their parents or elder siblings to bypass the ban.

This could be emulated by other nations.

Other nations have been thinking of following the footsteps of Australia, which initiated the discussion of the measures in 2024. One of them is the government of Denmark, which in November announced that it had intended to ban social media use by children under 15.

“The fact that despite some scepticism in the market, it is effective and it is now being copied around the world, is a matter of Australian pride,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Friday.

The opposition legislators have proposed that the youth have easily bypassed the ban or have moved to other applications that are not highly scrutinized as the biggest. Friday, Inman Grant told her office that statistics she had viewed indicated an increase in downloads of alternative apps once the ban was implemented, but not an increase in usage.

“We are not doing anything yet in the long term that we can say,” she said.

In the meantime, she said, her regulator would impose world-leading AI companion and chatbot restrictions in March. She did not give any additional information.