Meta shuts 550,000 accounts on Australia’s kids social media ban

The law, which came into effect Dec. 10, mandates services such as ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok and Instagram keep under-16s off their platforms or face fines

Meta Platforms Inc. said it has shut down almost 550,000 accounts in Australia to comply with the country’s landmark social media ban for children.

The 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.

The law, which came into effect Dec. 10, mandates services such as ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok and Instagram keep under-16s off their platforms or face fines of up to A$49.5 million ($33 million). It marks Australia as the world’s first democracy to undertake such a crackdown in response to growing concerns about social media’s harms.

Still, Meta continued to express its opposition to the ban, calling for standard age-verification and more industry-wide protections for young people no matter which apps they use, as it flags the surge in downloads of alternative social media platforms as an area of concern.

This 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.