In the months since Australia enacted the world's first sweeping ban on social media for those under sixteen, Meta has removed more than 750,000 suspected underage accounts — a figure that speaks both to the scale of the effort and the limits of its reach. The law was born of a society's reckoning with what screens may be doing to its youngest minds, yet government data suggests that more than four in five affected young people remained online through the ban's early months. What unfolds in Australia is not merely a regulatory dispute but a civilizational question: whether democratic societies
Meta removes 756,000 Australian teen accounts as social media ban enforcement intensifies
The ban aims to protect children's physical and mental health from social media exposure, though compliance effectiveness remains contested.