The online regulator has just released its first comprehensive compliance update report on how the world-first policy is tracking, revealing that five investigations into potential breaches by Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube are now underway.
Enforcement action has not yet been taken.
While social media companies have initiated “some steps” to comply with the legislation that came into effect in December last year, significant gaps remain, eSafety reports.
Some platforms have encouraged children to attempt age assurance even where they declared themselves to be underage, and some have enabled under-16s to keep attempting the same age-assurance checks to eventually gain access.
Not enough measures have been taken by some platforms to prevent children from having an account, eSafety says.
A study involving 898 parents and carers of children aged 8 to 15 years that was conducted around six weeks after the ban came into effect has shed light on how the new regulations are playing out.
Of the parents whose child had an account on each platform prior to the ban, around 7 in 10 reported they still had an account on Facebook (63.6 per cent), Instagram (69.1 per cent), Snapchat (69.4 per cent), and TikTok (69.3 per cent).
Just 3 in 10 reported that their child no longer had an account, while one in two of these parents reported their child still had a YouTube account.
Helen Bird, manager of education services at Butterfly Foundation, warns that some early feedback from schools suggests the social media ban is also having unintended consequences in the classroom.
“This is anecdotal feedback, it’s not a large sample, but we have had some educators come back to us that saying that because the social media ban is now in place, that they don't need to educate around online influences right now,” Bird tells EducationHQ.
“I think that really does reflect [an] overall misunderstanding of really what's happening in young people's lives.”
In Bird’s view, digital literacy education around social media cannot afford to be dropped just because there is a ban in place.
“It's like drug education. Drugs and vaping are illegal, but we don't not educate around [them]. So, it's the same kind of premise with this, really.
“We don't stop educating young people because there's a policy in place. Policy sets the boundaries, but education provides the protection.”
Meanwhile, some educators have reported positive early signs of the ban via the National Online Safety Education Council, including that some students appeared relieved they were no longer on social media, eSafety has flagged.
When the ban came into effect in mid-December, 4.7 million age-restricted accounts were removed or restricted from platforms.
In March, eSafety says more than 300,000 additional accounts were prevented from signing in and accessing age-restricted platforms.
“While these numbers are helpful, they are not determinative of whether reasonable steps have been taken to comply with the SMMA obligation,” the report warns.
Senator Sarah Henderson, Shadow Minister for Communications and Digital Safety, has jumped on the new findings, arguing the report proves the Government’s social media ban is “riddled with defects and does nothing to mitigate the harm caused to thousands of children who are either dodging the ban or fall outside its scope”.
“Why isn’t Labor taking action on technology which can be installed on devices to combat child sexual abuse material?” she questioned.
“As the International Justice Mission is advocating, there are solutions to combat the horrific levels of online child sexual abuse including the live streaming of such material.
“Why don’t parents have access to safety tools which are used by big business and government departments under big tech enterprise agreements?”
The compliance report flagged no notable change in the number of cyberbullying and image-based abuse complaints involving age-restricted accounts across the platforms in January and February 2026 when compared to the same period last year.
“What we are now seeing is exactly what we feared,” Henderson asserted.
“Kids are finding workarounds such as sharing devices and using false ages, raising the risk they are being pushed into unregulated and dangerous online spaces.”
“When thousands of underage accounts are still active, you cannot claim success as the government is doing…”
Communications Minister Anika Wells has said the alleged breaches by social media companies are unacceptable.
“Big tech is failing and we've spent the summer building evidence to be able to take enforcement action,” she told Sky News yesterday.
Systemic breaches of the age restriction laws can be punished with fines of up to $49.5 million.
eSafety says it is aiming to finalise at least some of the five investigations underway and make a decision about any enforcement action by the middle of the year.
“We are interrogating how the systems and processes have been set up and deployed and validating the information we have already obtained through previous legally enforceable information-gathering notices.
“eSafety will not hesitate to take enforcement action where it has sufficient evidence of non-compliance…”
Some experts have said a key limitation of the ban is that restricting access to accounts does not address the actual harms posed by content, algorithms and other platform features.
RMIT’s Distinguished Professor of Information Sciences Lisa Given has cautioned that “there is a long road ahead for compliance”.
“And if we want to fully address the harms posed by these platforms, new legislation that actually targets the root problems is needed.”
Bird remains concerned that a financial literacy focus is being dropped within schools.
“I think that there is this general naivety amongst educators that, in a sense, the ban has done the hard work for them.
“And we really want to get the message out there that this is a prime opportunity to be giving young people the skills that they need for digital literacy and critical thinking.”
