Europe's Social Media Ban Stampede Outpaces the Evidence From Australia's Own Experiment

When Australia flipped the switch on its world-first social media ban for under-16s last December, politicians across Europe took notice. Two months later, a continent-wide scramble to replicate the experiment is underway — even as early evidence from Australia suggests the ban may be far less effective than its proponents promised.

Germany's Chancellor Friedrich Merz has framed social media restrictions as a remedy for what he calls "personality deficits and problems in the social behavior of young people" . Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has pledged to shield children from the "digital wild west" . And French President Emmanuel Macron declared that "the emotions of our children and teenagers are not for sale or to be manipulated" . The rhetorical arms race among European leaders is unmistakable — but the policy details remain strikingly vague.

The Reuters factbox published this week catalogues the sheer breadth of the movement . France's National Assembly approved legislation in January to ban under-15s from social media, though the bill still requires Senate passage. Denmark plans to prohibit access for children under 15, with legislation potentially taking effect by mid-2026. Spain announced an under-16 ban with mandatory age verification. Greece says it is "very close" to unveiling similar restrictions. Norway is drafting absolute minimum age legislation, while Slovenia is preparing a law to block under-15s entirely. Britain's technology minister Liz Kendall confirmed the government is considering an Australia-style ban as early as this year .

The pattern is striking: more than a dozen countries are now racing to restrict children's social media access, most citing Australia's ban as their template. But the Australian experience itself raises uncomfortable questions about whether prohibition works better as political theater than practical policy.

Australia's eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant reported that social media companies "removed access to about 4.7 million accounts identified as belonging to children under 16 in the first half of December" . The number sounds impressive — and it has clearly caught the attention of European policymakers eager for a quick legislative win. But Tama Leaver, a professor of internet studies at Curtin University in Perth, told Deutsche Welle that the headline figures "don't necessarily tell the whole story" .

"We don't have a breakdown of that number, nor do we know how many new accounts — possibly from teens pretending to be older — were created over the same period of time," Leaver said . He added that, anecdotally, "many young people aged 13-15 seem to have circumvented the ban, while others seem to have been banned from some platforms and not others" . The technical limitations of age verification through selfies and biometric tools have proven "pretty much as inaccurate as most people expected in advance" .

Susan Sawyer, from Australia's Murdoch Children's Research Institute — the country's largest child health research center — expressed surprise at the speed of international adoption. "I had expected there would be much more of a watchful expectancy of the results of the Australian ban before governments would be jumping in quite as quickly," she told DW . "We don't know what the effects of the ban are going to be and we need to evaluate this carefully. Governments need to be careful to avoid thinking that social media bans are a silver bullet to this problem" .

Critics of the bans raise a different set of concerns entirely. Amnesty Tech has called such measures ineffective, arguing they ignore the digital realities of younger generations . The American Civil Liberties Union has warned that age-based access restrictions risk "online censorship" that threatens constitutional rights without delivering real safety improvements. Digital rights advocates point out that pushing children off mainstream platforms may simply drive them to less regulated corners of the internet — encrypted messaging apps, unmoderated forums, or platforms beyond the reach of any national regulator.

The privacy implications of age verification systems have drawn particular scrutiny. Dr. Stephan Dreyer from the Leibniz Institute for Media Research in Hamburg argued that Europe may not need such bans at all, given that the European Digital Services Act already addresses many safety concerns . "Age verification at scale requires either comprehensive control infrastructure or probabilistic profiling, with both approaches showing deep intrusions into the rights of all users," he said. "Europe, with its stronger fundamental rights frameworks and the GDPR, would face these tensions even more acutely. We should learn from Australia's difficulties, not rush to replicate them" .

The legal landscape is also fraught with uncertainty. Reddit has already filed a lawsuit opposing Australia's ban . In the United States, state-level social media restrictions have faced repeated court challenges on First Amendment grounds. The question of whether EU member states can unilaterally impose bans — given the bloc's harmonized digital regulation framework — remains legally untested.

Sawyer's research, presented to the Australian Senate Committee before the ban was enacted, found that children aged 10 to 13 showed the most adverse effects from social media usage, particularly girls . She predicted that any cultural shift would be a "slow burn" — the current generation of six-to-ten-year-olds who don't yet have smartphones will simply be older when parents first allow access. "It's going to be a change in social norms that's not going to take place overnight" .

Leaver advocated a more nuanced approach than the blanket prohibition most European governments appear to favor. "The most confused group are those 13-15 year olds who already had social media accounts, were booted off the platforms, and then will come back on at 16," he said. "It would have made a lot more sense to grandfather the rules, so under 13s can't get accounts until 16, but those with existing accounts keep access. I think a lot of 13-15 year olds feel like the ban was done to them, rather than with them" .

For European governments, the temptation to follow Australia is politically irresistible. Child safety polls well across every demographic. But the gap between announcing a ban and enforcing one is vast — and the Australian experiment, barely two months old, has yet to produce evidence that prohibition reduces harm rather than merely shifting it. The next twelve months will reveal whether Europe's political enthusiasm survives contact with the technical, legal, and civil liberties challenges that Australia is only beginning to confront.