Overview
- Australia's online safety regulator, which released a report Tuesday, said about seven in ten pre-ban teen accounts stayed active on Instagram, Snapchat or TikTok even after roughly five million accounts were removed.
- The government is investigating Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube for possible breaches and is preparing a case for federal court, where fines can reach A$49.5 million.
- eSafety detailed gaps that let minors slip through, including no age check prompts, easy edits to birth dates, repeated verification attempts and sign-ups with false data.
- Meta said precise age checks are hard and urged app-store or phone-level parental gates, while Snap said it blocked 450,000 accounts.
- France's Senate backed a revised under-15 limit, Austria plans an under-14 block and Indonesia has begun enforcing under-16 rules, even as Reddit and a civil-rights group challenge Australia's law in court.