Meta says it has axed 750,000 Facebook and Instagram youth accounts in Australia

Meta Platforms Inc. says it has removed access to more than 750,000 Instagram and Facebook accounts in Australia believed to belong to people under 16 since it began complying with the country’s landmark youth social media ban last year.

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The figure includes more than 500,000 accounts Meta removed before the law came into effect in December, along with those it has shut down since, the company said Thursday. That includes 462,000 Instagram accounts and 294,000 Facebook accounts.

“Enforcement is ongoing, and these numbers will continue to grow,” the Menlo Park, California-based company said. Meta reports details on its enforcement to the Australian government and provides updates to be transparent with the public, it said, adding that it uses AI-powered detection and other measures.

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Regulators, parents and academics have been looking for early signs of how Australia’s new rules might be working — or not. The regulations, which came into effect in December, mandate that the likes of Meta, Snap Inc. and ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok prohibit under-16s from holding accounts or face fines.

The rules were driven by fears over the effects of social media on children. While more than two dozen countries have enacted their own bans or are considering similar restrictions after Australia’s move, many Australian children have found workarounds or simply haven’t hit age checks.

A report last month by Australia’s online safety regulator, known as eSafety, said the ban had led to only a marginal reduction in underage users in the first three months of its implementation. It found the proportion of under-16s who reported using a social media platform in March was 81.5 per cent, down from 85.9 per cent before the law took effect.

“The primary reason children continued to hold age-restricted social media accounts at three months appeared to be ineffective implementation of age assurance measures,” eSafety said.

“ESafety’s survey data was collected at the end of March,” a Meta spokesperson said. “We’ve continued to remove accounts and implement additional measures to identify under-16s.”

About 38% of children ages 10 to 15 who held accounts on Instagram said the reason they were still on the platform was that it had not yet asked them to verify their ages, the report said. For Facebook, the figure was roughly 28%. Children using other platforms reported similar figures.

Meta’s spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment on those figures, or to a query about how many under-16s Meta believes may still have Instagram or Facebook accounts in Australia.

ESafety’s commissioner didn’t respond to a request for comment on Meta’s update.

(Updates with further comments from Meta in eighth paragraph.)

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