Australia’s Under-16 Social Media Ban Holds Hard Lessons for Vietnam

Australia’s social media ban for under-16s has been live for six months. The eSafety Commissioner says 4.7 million underage accounts were removed from major platforms after the December 10, 2025 cut-off, while an April survey of 1,050 Australian 12-to-15-year-olds found that 60 percent of teens who had accounts before the ban still hold at least one.

That gap is the live data point Hanoi is reading. Vietnam’s 16th National Assembly opened debate in April on a proposal to copy parts of the Australian framework, with a separate Cybersecurity Law due to take effect on July 1, 2026.

Australia’s Six-Month Scorecard: 4.7 Million Accounts, 60% Still On

The eSafety Commissioner published its first compliance update on March 31, and the headline figure was the account purge. Major platforms removed roughly 4.7 million accounts held by Australians under 16 by mid-December, hitting the operational target the law set out at passage.

The Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act cleared Australia’s parliament in November 2024 and took effect on December 10, 2025. What was not in the original talking points: how quickly evasion would become the public story rather than removal.

Polling from the Molly Rose Foundation, the British charity set up after the death of 14-year-old Molly Russell, showed that more than half of Australian teens aged 12 to 15 retained or rebuilt accounts within weeks. A separate April survey of 1,050 Australians in that age group pegged the share above 60 percent among teens who had been active users before the law.

Gillian Bird, Australia’s ambassador to Vietnam, said the gap is by design rather than by failure. “This is not about chasing perfection but establishing a new norm for social media use,” she told Tuoi Tre in an interview published this month.

What the December Law Required of Platforms

The Act puts the legal duty on platforms, not parents and not children themselves. Age-restricted services must take “reasonable steps” to prevent under-16s from holding accounts, detect accounts that slip through, and block repeat sign-ups, with non-compliance carrying fines of up to AUD 49.5 million (about US$32 million) per breach. The detailed obligations are spelt out in the eSafety guidance for age-restricted platforms.

The classification list captures the obvious suspects and a few that lobbied to be excluded. Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, X, Reddit, Twitch and Kick are in. Messaging-only services, gaming-first platforms without persistent feeds, and platforms used primarily for education or health support are out, which is why WhatsApp and Google Classroom sit outside the perimeter.

Privacy guardrails sit alongside the obligations. Platforms cannot demand a government ID as the only acceptable proof of age, and any age-assurance data they do collect must be destroyed once verification is complete. The clause was added after consumer-group pressure in 2025 and is one piece Bird flagged as a model export for Vietnam.

Where Enforcement Broke: Face Masks, Parental IDs, and Repeat Sign-Ups

Teens are inventive. The April survey of 12-to-15-year-olds found that the most common bypass methods were low-tech and disarmingly effective:

• Using a parent’s face for facial-recognition age checks, sometimes while the parent slept
• Logging in with a parent’s existing account credentials
• Holding up printed photographs or wearing mesh masks of adult features to trick liveness detection
• Re-registering with a falsified birth date after an account was pulled
• Switching to a sibling’s or older friend’s verified account
• Routing through a virtual private network (VPN) to fake an offshore location

Only about one in 20 Australian teens reported using a VPN to spoof their location, undercutting the early panic that the technology would be the main loophole. Snapchat and Meta have both said they look at account-activity signals beyond IP address, so a Sydney teenager who logs in through a Singapore VPN but messages 50 Sydney classmates daily still trips the location check. The mask trick has drawn the heaviest media coverage because it is the most visual: a printed photograph of an adult held in front of the screen will defeat several cheaper age-verification vendors, though leading providers now check for screen reflections and three-dimensional facial movement.

The Commissioner’s March Compliance Report

The compliance update on March 31 landed sharper than the platforms expected. Communications Minister Anika Wells announced the same day that the government would investigate Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube for potential violations, with formal enforcement decisions due by mid-year, per the Department of Infrastructure social media minimum age page.

The regulator’s complaints were operational, not philosophical. Several platforms allowed self-declared under-16 users to re-attempt age verification immediately after a rejection, sometimes hundreds of times from the same device, with no cooldown and no escalation flag.

• 5 of 10 designated platforms flagged with “major gaps” in enforcement
• Mid-2026 deadline for the first systemic-failure enforcement decisions
• AUD 49.5 million maximum penalty per breach under the Act
• Hundreds of retries permitted by several platforms when one self-declared under-16 retests age verification from a single device

Other platforms had no working mechanism for adult users to report a suspected underage account, the kind of basic feedback loop the law was meant to require. That gap is what tipped the eSafety Commissioner’s office from monitoring into formal investigation.

A finding against any one of the named US platforms would carry weight beyond Australia, since Indonesia and Vietnam are watching for any sign the framework can be enforced rather than just announced. Wells has signalled she will prioritise cases that demonstrate “systemic failures” rather than one-off underage accounts that slipped through.

The framing matters. A settlement that ratifies the systemic-failure standard would harden the law and pressure every jurisdiction considering a copy. A settlement that treats the failures as edge cases would soften the precedent and leave each country to design its own enforcement teeth from scratch.

Vietnam’s Debate Splits Along the Same Lines

Vietnam’s 16th National Assembly took up the question on April 17, when Nguyen Thi Mai Thoa, a member of the Committee for Culture and Society, raised a proposal to limit or ban under-16 access to certain platforms. Her case mirrored Australia’s, citing accelerating harmful content, parents without time to supervise, and platform-side enforcement as the only model that scales beyond individual households.

An expert quoted by Vietnam News in April offered the strongest pushback:

Prohibition is not an effective approach. Anything strictly banned without explanation often becomes more appealing, leading children to access it secretly without the skills to protect themselves.

The expert, speaking to Vietnam News during the National Assembly session, was channelling a wider school-system concern. Vietnamese teachers routinely use Facebook groups and Zalo, the local messaging app, to push homework and parent-teacher updates, so a blanket under-16 ban would force a re-architecture of how Vietnamese schools communicate. The framework being assembled looks more like Vietnam’s own model than Australia’s: the country already requires parents to register their under-16’s social media accounts under a 2024 rule, and a new directive issued in early 2026 asks platforms to eliminate anonymous accounts and add age-restriction tooling under the Cybersecurity Law that activates July 1.

The Region Is Picking Sides

Australia is no longer alone. France’s National Assembly approved a ban on under-15s using social media in January 2026, by 116 votes to 23. Indonesia’s restriction on under-16s using “higher-risk” platforms took effect on March 28, with YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, Bigo Live and Roblox all included.

The four frameworks closest to Vietnam’s decision space differ in age cutoff, enforcement model, and what counts as a covered platform.

The age cutoff differences matter more than they look. Indonesia’s tiered model concedes that a 13-year-old can handle YouTube Kids and similar lower-risk feeds with parental supervision, while a 15-year-old should still be locked out of feed-based discovery on the bigger platforms. France’s 15-year cutoff aligns with the existing French digital age of consent. Australia and the Vietnam proposal share the strictest line at 16, and UK doctors surveyed in late 2025 pushed Parliament for the same threshold after citing weekly clinical encounters with children harmed by platform exposure (see our coverage of the UK Parliament petition from 454 British doctors).

What Hanoi Can Borrow, What It Should Skip

The borrowable parts of the Australian model are operational. Platform liability has held up legally in the first three months, and the privacy clause requiring age-assurance data to be destroyed after verification has neutralised the main civil-society objection. Canberra’s published compliance dashboard gives reporters and parents a single source for what is and is not working.

The skippable parts are the ones Australia is now fixing on the fly. A blanket platform list without messaging or education carve-outs would break Zalo’s role in Vietnamese classrooms. A facial-recognition mandate without specified vendor standards has already produced the mask workaround, and Vietnam’s age-verification vendor market is thinner than Australia’s.

One under-discussed element is the offline alternative. Canberra paired the ban with a AUD 200 million (about US$142 million) program called Play Our Way grant funding for women’s and girls’ sport, betting that physical activity could absorb some of the screen time the ban displaces. Hanoi has no comparable budget on the table.

Bird used a seatbelt analogy in her Tuoi Tre interview, comparing the social-media ban to mandatory seatbelt laws that took a generation to normalise. The analogy works for the policy arc. It does less work for the timeline Hanoi is operating on, since the Cybersecurity Law’s July 1 date will set platform obligations before the National Assembly has finished its own debate (see our earlier reporting on Vietnam’s Decree 174 on social media content fines).

If Wells’ investigation produces a successful enforcement action against one of the named US platforms by mid-year, the Australian model gets a citable precedent that Vietnamese legislators can lean on through the rest of the session. If the investigation ends in a quiet settlement or a retreat, Hanoi will likely default to its own parental-registration approach and skip the platform-liability bet entirely.