Arya News - Fourteen-year-old cheerleader Lucy Brooks briefly lost some friends on Snapchat when Australia’s ban on social media came into effect on Wednesday.
Fourteen-year-old cheerleader Lucy Brooks briefly lost some friends on Snapchat when Australia’s ban on social media came into effect on Wednesday.
But within 24 hours, they were back. Many had made new accounts, with some borrowing the faces of parents and older friends who were happy to help them evade age detection technology.
When Australia imposed its world-leading ban on social media for under-16s, critics predicted other platforms would quickly replace the 10 banned sites that include teen favorites Snapchat, TikTok and Instagram.
But perhaps they didn’t anticipate how easy it would be for teenagers to pop back up again on the same platforms, using the same kind of tricks that teens in the United Kingdom used when their government introduced its Online Safety Act in July.
“A lot of the time it was with the parents’ knowledge, but people are also using AI-generated pictures of people and videos, like getting AI to make a 40-year-old person … to get past it as well,” said Lucy, who lost access to Instagram but is still on Snapchat and TikTok.
Age verification companies say their technology can roughly assess who is using an account, even if the owner passes the age check – so it remains to be seen if those accounts will eventually disappear.
But for now, under-16s intent on accessing banned sites can still do so – especially those whose parents have no objection to them being back.
‘Getting phone numbers is annoying’
To mark the ban’s introduction on Wednesday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese hosted a typical Australian barbecue on the lawns of his Sydney residence.
His guests included the parents of children who died by suicide after enduring cyber bullying, and campaigners who had lobbied for a return to childhoods unencumbered by the threat of online abuse or sexual exploitation.
To celebrate the world-leading legislation, the Sydney Harbour Bridge was lit up in patriotic green and gold and the campaign slogan “Let Them Be Kids.”
The Sydney Harbour Bridge is illuminated on December 10, 2025. - Brendon Thorne/Getty Images
In a park under the bridge, a group of four 15-year-old boys on bikes stopped to talk to CNN about the ban. None of them had lost their accounts.
“I think it’s because I put my birthdate in as the year 2000 when I first signed up,” said one of the boys, his friends nodding. “It’s just easier to do it that way.”
“I wouldn’t care if I lost TikTok, I don’t want to lose Snapchat though,” another boy said, explaining that the platform is convenient for messaging friends without the need to exchange phone numbers.
“Getting actual phone numbers is annoying,” the boy said, when asked if WhatsApp or Apple iMessage would suffice. Another boy said he gets all his news from Instagram and is rarely exposed to any form of traditional media.
“Sometimes I get Channel Nine in my feed,” he said, of the Australian free-to-air station. The conversation ended with the boys gently teasing one of their friends, who suggested that he sometimes reads printed newspapers. “No way mate,” the boys laughed.
‘He didn’t even try to bypass it’
Leo Puglisi, the 18-year-old founder of online news channel 6 News, opposes the ban and is not convinced it’ll achieve its aim.
“I know that it doesn’t stop young people going on social media, because my brother’s under the age of 16, and he is still on social media right now,” Puglisi told CNN on Thursday. “He didn’t even try to bypass it… so I’m fairly confident that’s not working there.”
Puglisi started his news channel when he was 11 years old and now manages a small team of nine school-age journalists who juggle homework with breaking news. He says 6 News wouldn’t exist if the ban was in place when he started out.
“We just have to remember in this whole debate, we’re talking about 15-year-olds being banned from social media, not 5-year-olds. A 15-year-old who can have a part-time job, I think, should be allowed to log into YouTube.”
Entrepreneur Lucas Lane is 16, so is not worried about losing his accounts, but he’s very concerned for younger kids who look to him for leadership.
He started his own business, Glossy Boys, when he was 13, after struggling to find black nail polish in his local pharmacy. Now the business sells “skate-proof” nail polish to a growing market of young people mainly through Instagram, Facebook and TikTok.
“This social media ban is going to very much impact my business, and not only the business, but also the community and people here in Australia. I want people to be unique. I want people to be themselves, and I’m afraid that the government and the social media companies are not letting that happen.”
He says education, restrictions and protection would be much better than a ban.
Two legal challenges have been launched in the Australia’s High Court against the ban, including one from popular online forum Reddit on Friday that alleges it presents some “serious privacy and political expression issues for everyone on the internet.” Reddit stressed it was complying with the law in the meantime.
‘It’s scary and nerve-wracking’
Asked on TikTok what they would do after the ban, some users jokingly suggested youth crime. Others said they’d be switching to lesser-known apps, like Yope, a photo-sharing site, and Coverstar, which advertises itself as a safer version of TikTok with “No DMs. No Creeps.”
Lemon8, owned by ByteDance, was initially seen as a replacement for TikTok, but the company says it’s now limited to over-16s.
Shar, a 15-year-old aspiring singer, opened an account on Lemon8 and had urged others to follow. She’d been worried that all 4,000 of her TikTok followers would disappear overnight. That didn’t happen.
“None of my accounts on any platform has been shut down, not even the ones that I put my real age,” said Shar, who was relieved to find that her TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat accounts are still working.
Before the ban, Shar was worried about losing 4,000 followers on TikTok. She"s still on the platform. - Courtesy of Shar
“I genuinely do not know a person who has had it shut down, my age,” she said. “I’m pretty surprised, to be honest, because they made such a big deal about it. I think if you make such a big deal about something, you need to go through with it.”
However, for cheerleader Lucy and her friends, uncertainty about how long they’ll still be on social media is causing anxiety. She said her friends haven’t been able to download their accounts because they don’t have enough storage. They don’t want to delete them and lose their memories, yet they’re scared their private photos and messages might be frozen in a vast digital vault somewhere, potentially for years.
“It’s scary and nerve-wracking for a lot of people, like they don’t know what to do,” Lucy said. She said her friends had swapped phone numbers before the ban just in case they were cut off, but they haven’t had to use them – yet.
Lucy wants to keep Instagram because, as a cheerleader, her image is sometimes posted to cheerleading accounts, and she likes to know where and how it’s being used. She also follows other cheerleading groups to check out their routines as she tries to improve.
Lucy – like many other children – believes there’s a need to address problematic content on social media, but she doesn’t think a ban is the best response.
“I actually want it to work, because I think children shouldn’t be on social media that much,” said Lucy. “But I don’t think it will work,” she quickly added.
She said a more effective response would be to impose time limits – “anywhere from one hour to two hours I reckon is fair.”
CNN’s Angus Watson and Antoinette Radford contributed reporting.
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