If under-16-year-olds can bypass the online safety act, what’s the point in banning them from social media?

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According to the Molly Rose Foundation, 61 per cent of Australian teens are still using social media. You’d be surprised how easy it is.

As a teenager myself, I found it surprisingly easy to bypass the restrictions put in place after the original Online Safety Act took effect in 2025. Even people younger than I knew that a simple VPN, downloaded for free from the App Store, could be used to avoid age checks on ‘blocked’ websites.

It wasn't just VPNs. On social media, people posted videos of........

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