In 2024, Australia passed a new law called the Online Safety Amendment. Its primary purpose was simple: to introduce “an obligation on certain social media platforms to take reasonable steps to prevent children under 16 years of age from having an account.” By then, worries about young people, social media, and screen time had gone mainstream, and legislative proposals were popping up around the world, mostly in the form of school phone bans and age-verification laws. Australia, though, just went ahead and did the thing — a national ban, in a large liberal democracy, on teens using social media.

The rules went into effect in December 2025 and covered “Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, Twitch, X, YouTube, Kick and Reddit … among others,” a list which “may change in the future.” Lawmakers and activists in other countries were watching closely; the severity and simplicity of the ban could help clarify a set of issues about which the limited available data tells a stubbornly unsatisfying story. An article published in Nature suggested that the move was an enormous and unprecedented “natural experiment.” Six months in, a group of Australian researchers have published their findings in The BMJ. Their takeaway? The ban, in practice, wasn’t much of a ban at all:

The findings........

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