(Bloomberg) — Meta Platforms Inc. said it has closed nearly 550,000 accounts in Australia to comply with the country’s historic ban on social media for children.
The social media giant has closed about 330,000 Instagram accounts, 173,000 Facebook accounts and nearly 40,000 Threads accounts belonging to people believed to be under 16 years of age, it said in a blog post.
The law, which came into force on December 10, requires services such as ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok and Instagram to prevent children under 16 from accessing their platforms, under penalty of fines of up to A$49.5 million (US$33 million). It makes Australia the first democracy in the world to adopt such a strict measure in response to growing concerns about the harms of social media.
Continues after advertising
Still, Meta has continued to voice its opposition to the ban, advocating for standard age verification and more protections for young people across the industry regardless of the apps they use, while also highlighting the rise in downloads from alternative social media platforms as an area of concern.
This avoids “the ‘whack-a-mole’ effect of having to keep up with the new apps that teenagers will migrate to in order to get around the social media ban law,” Meta said in the post.
