Two More Studies Show that Australia’s Age Verification Laws Have Failed

Research in one analysis show that 7 in 10 teens still have accounts on Facebook. Another shows 60% are still on social media.

More data is rolling in for Australia’s age verification laws and it keeps making things look worse and worse. The failure of Australia’s age verification laws were predictable from the beginning and no matter how much advocates are trying to deny it, the evidence just keeps getting that much more clearer.

On the lead up to the age verification, there was a study that concluded that vendors had a failure rate as high as 87%. That’s just with people honestly putting their information in. Of course, that got ignored as supporters falsely claimed that the technology is 98% effective. People then started defeating these age gates with fake IDs, video game characters, pictures of golden retrievers, and using sharpies.

In the face of the early signs of failure of age verification, mainstream media outlets went into denial and tried to paper over all of the early signs that Australia’s age verification was a failure by arguing that it has gone off with “barely a hitch”. This as the mainstream media encouraged other nations to follow Australia’s disastrous lead.

Sadly, other jurisdictions did follow the disastrous lead and the results were just as predicable. Europe developed their own app so that there would be “no excuses” only to see that app quickly go down in flames. The UK pressed forward with age verification laws only to see their laws fail spectacular in a truly “history repeating itself” moment.

While the mainstream media did whatever they could to ignore the piling up of failures on the age verification front, it became increasingly difficult to ignore the results. In a further indictment to Australia’s age verification law, the British Medical Journal found that 85% of people supposed to be banned from social media are still on it. That was arguably the biggest blow to the credibility of age verification yet and one that even the government and media couldn’t ignore. Government and media fantasy, it turns out, didn’t match reality. So, in response, the Australian government decided to just blame social media for the governments screw up and proposed doubling the fines of social media if they fail to comply with the impossible to comply with laws. Arguably, this opened the door for social media platforms to deploy the nuclear option of just blocking those jurisdictions altogether, though we haven’t heard much from social media companies on that one.

Appologists, of course, are trying to deflect the failures of these laws. Some are arguing that this is just one data point. Others, however, are arguing that social media is somehow engaging in a conspiracy to do everything possible to undermine these laws – something that they obviously have no evidence for especially given that the platforms typically employ the services of third party vendors. Of course, logic and reason has long been abandoned by supporters of these laws, so why start now?

None of this has really slowed reality down. Now, we are learning of more research data that was published by the Australian government that admits that 7 in 10 users that were supposed to be banned from Facebook are still on there. From the Australian government (PDF) (Freezenet mirror):

Despite overall reductions in account ownership, a substantial proportion of children under 16 retained accounts on age-restricted platforms

Of the parents who reported their child had an account on each platform prior to 10 December 2025, around 7 in 10 reported that their child still had an account on Facebook (63.6%), Instagram (69.1%), Snapchat (69.4%), and TikTok (69.3%). Around 3 in 10 reported that their child no longer had an account. One in two of these parents (48.5%) reported that their child still had an account on YouTube following the age restrictions coming into effect.

These numbers are absolutely damning for the age verification laws. While the Australian government is clearly trying to spin these laws as an overwhelming success (you can tell just by the excerpt alone), the numbers speak for themselves about just how spectacularly these laws have failed. This is an entire world removed from the talking points of supports who argue that the technology exists today and it’s simply up to the government to mandate their use. Well, the technology is being used and reality clearly begs to differ.

The thing is, if that data point wasn’t enough, we also have additional research from the Molly Rose Foundation. That research has shown that 60% of “under age” people are still on social media. From the Molly Rose Foundation:

A majority of Australian children still use restricted social media apps despite the ban for under-16s, major new polling of young people shows.

Three in five (61%) Australian 12-15 year-olds who had accounts on restricted platforms before the ban came into force still have access to one or more accounts. Major platforms have retained a majority of their child users, with 53% of previous TikTok users, 53% of YouTube users and 52% of Instagram users still able to access an account on these platforms.

The first major polling of 1,050 children aged 12-15 was conducted by Molly Rose Foundation and YouthInsight, Australia’s largest online youth panel.

Molly Rose Foundation warns this data raises major question marks about the effectiveness of Australia’s social media ban, and that given the findings it would be a ‘high stakes gamble’ for the UK to follow suit at this stage.

Ouch. Another day, another indictment on Australia’s age verification laws. You can check out the research here (PDF) but there was one particularly damning chart that I wanted to highlight. That is this one:

So, in other words, we are talking about a percentage of the entire population who might be affected by this. That is nuts. What’s more, the percentage of people still on social media went down by a very tiny amount as well. So, how did these people get around it? Apparently, they got in through the path of least resistance: by just having the faulty age gates let them in:

The fail here is staggering. For perspective, YouTube uses an in-house age verification setup, but TikTok has been known to use vendors like Yoti and Persona and this is the result. Instagram uses Yoti. Snapchat, for their part, uses K-ID. Basically, all of the top brands, all of the sales pitches, 100% of the failure. The punchline, of course, is that the Australian government thinks that blaming the platforms is the answer here. To this day, the vendors are so bad that the platforms might as well have used the method of flipping a coin in letting suspected users in. They would have had better accuracy on that front than relying on these vendors. The kids getting in didn’t even have to rely on sneaky tricks to get in for the most part. They let the vendors just straight up fail at their jobs. This is what pushing a fantasy vision does to your government policy.

The reality is that we now have multiple generations who grew up with the internet. Children are growing up with tablets in their hands, teenagers are wandering around with a cell phone in their pocket, gamers have PCs in their bedrooms and basements. They are digital natives who have spent their entire lives learning about the digital world around them. So, of course they are going to figure out how to circumvent these poorly designed age gates! They might consult Reddit, ask their buddies for advice, or ask around on various Discord and Telegram channels how to get around these blocks. The information to accomplish circumventing the age gates are readily available, so it’s not a matter of “if” they are going to defeat these age gates, but “when”.

I’ve been saying these things from the very beginning. For example, in the early days of Canada’s push back in 2024, I mocked a Senator for saying that children are too stupid to understand how VPNs work and that concern could be easily ignored. Of course, for some, my comments were dismissed as “disinformation” or “mean spirited” and were ignored outright like everyone else who has basic “common” sense on this front. Now reality is taking hold and it turns out that people like me were right and age verification supporters were wrong.

Now, reality is taking hold and age verification is failing pretty much everywhere it is being implemented. As time goes on, more and more data is coming out saying that us critics were right all along. It is up to government to choose between doubling down on this disaster or finally seeing basic levels of reason and backing off of these badly thought out plans. Since evidence based policy making is something of an extinct concept in practice these days, you can bet that I’m not exactly holding out much hope for the future on this front.

(Via Michael Geist)

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Bluesky and Facebook.