Meta closes 550,000 Australian children’s accounts, warns ban ‘not meeting objectives’

Meta Platforms said it has shut down almost 550,000 accounts in Australia to comply with the country’s landmark social media ban for children.\nThe social media giant has closed around 330,000 Instagram accounts, 173,000 Facebook accounts and almost 40,000 Threads accounts belonging to people believed to be under 16 years of age, it said in a blog post.\nThe law, which came into effect on December 10, mandates services such as ByteDance’s TikTok and Instagram keep under-16s off their platforms or face fines of up to A$49.5 million (US$33 million).\nIt marks Australia as the world’s first democracy to undertake such a crackdown in response to growing concerns about social media’s harms.\n\n\nThe company said it was committed to complying with the law.\n“That said, we call on the Australian government to engage with industry constructively to find a better way forward, such as incentivising all of industry to raise the standard in providing safe, privacy-preserving, age appropriate experiences online, instead of blanket bans,” it said in a statement on Monday.\nMeta renewed an earlier call for app stores to be required to verify people’s ages and get parental approval before under 16s can download an app.\nThis avoids “the whack-a-mole effect of catching up with new apps that teens will migrate to in order to circumvent the social media ban law”, Meta said in the post.\nBillionaire Mark Zuckerberg’s company said parents and experts were worried about the ban isolating young people from online communities and driving some to less regulated apps and darker corners of the internet.\n\nInitial impacts of the legislation “suggest it is not meeting its objectives of increasing the safety and well-being of young Australians”, it argued.\nWhile raising concern over the lack of an industry standard for determining age online, Meta said its compliance with the Australian law would be a “multilayered process”.\nSince the ban, the California-based firm said it had helped found the OpenAge Initiative, a non-profit group that has launched age-verification tools called AgeKeys to be used with participating platforms.\nAdditional reporting by Agence France-Presse\n