Six months after Australia banned under-16s from ten platforms, three independent measurements found most of them still there — on adult accounts, with every youth protection switched off. Sovereign Australia would require the platforms to build one national parental control system, and put AI into classrooms rather than out of reach.
The Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024 commenced on 10 December 2025, requiring ten platforms — Facebook, Instagram, Kick, Reddit, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, Twitch, X and YouTube — to keep Australians under 16 off their services. Three independent measurements of the first six months agree on the result.
Platforms apply youth protections only to accounts they know belong to a minor: restricted messaging, limited recommendations, no adult content, advertising limits, stricter defaults. A child who gets back in with a false birth year holds an adult account, and every one of those protections is switched off, because the platform has been told it is dealing with an adult. The circumvention rate is not a compliance statistic. It is a count of children moved from supervised teen accounts to unsupervised adult ones.
The United States prohibited alcohol from 1920. Consumption fell sharply and then recovered, supply moved to criminal production, and unregulated product poisoned people. After thirteen years the answer was not tighter prohibition but repeal, and a regulated market: minimum purchase age, licensed sellers, product standards, taxation, and enforcement aimed at the seller rather than the drinker. That is the framework Australia now applies to alcohol, tobacco, gambling and driving.
The banned platforms are where a fifteen-year-old learns to code, follows a trade apprentice, runs a business page, joins a forum on their subject or watches a scientist explain something their school does not teach. The Act draws no distinction between that and the harm, so it removes both. Digital literacy — spotting a scam, a manipulated image, a bot, a bad-faith argument — is learned by supervised use, and cannot be taught to a cohort excluded from the medium. Australian children spend the years they learn fastest locked out of the dominant communication technology of their working lives, in a labour market where other countries’ children are not.
On 28 June 2026 the Government announced its response to the evidence: double the maximum penalty to $99 million and expand the regulator’s power to compel documents from platforms and from age-verification and digital-identity providers. Nothing in that package builds a control a parent can use. It raises the price of a failure the platforms cannot fully prevent, because the conduct being punished is a child entering a false birth date.
The controls already exist commercially. YouTube Kids runs a curated catalogue, no general search, timers and parental dashboards. Phone and console operating systems ship with screen-time limits, app allow-lists and content ratings. What does not exist is one place for a parent to use them: the settings are scattered across ten platforms and two operating systems, with different names, defaults and menus. That is the actual gap, and it is an engineering problem rather than a legislative one.
The platforms are required to build one national system through which a parent controls their own child’s access — one standard, one enrolment, one dashboard, working the same way across every platform in Australia. Through it a parent sets:
The current law makes a platform liable for a child’s deception, and the enforcement language treats the industry as an offender. The result is a legal fight rather than a build: two High Court challenges, compulsory information notices, ministerial statements about companies failing to obey, and engineering effort spent on compliance defence instead of on tools parents can use.
Sovereign Australia convenes the platforms and the operating-system vendors, specifies the outcome the system must deliver, agrees the technical standard with them and sets a delivery date. The regulator certifies that the system works and publishes who has connected to it. Penalty exposure attaches to refusing to build or connect — not to whether a determined child got around it. A company being sued has lawyers on the problem; a company that co-authored the standard has engineers on it.
The criminal law is unchanged and enforced: grooming, child abuse material, sexual extortion and non-consensual deepfakes are crimes, prosecuted as crimes, with the investigative capacity funded to do it. That is where the coercive power belongs — on adults committing offences against children, not on companies for failing to guess a birthday.
A student barred from AI at school uses it at home, unsupervised, without instruction and without disclosure. A student taught to use it learns what it is good at, where it invents, how to check it and how to say when they used it.
Australia has the instrument already. Education Ministers approved the Australian Framework for Generative AI in Schools on 5 October 2023 — six principles and 25 guiding statements, implemented from Term 1 2024, reviewed in 2024 and endorsed again in June 2025. It is two pages of guidance, and it is not a rollout. Delivery therefore depends on the state a child lives in: South Australia has taken EdChat to every public high school, Queensland is rolling out Corella statewide, Western Australia trialled AI for teacher workload in eight schools, Victoria requires parental opt-in for tools handling personal information, Tasmania permits approved tools only, and the ACT is introducing tools in stages.
Sovereign Australia funds a national rollout rather than publishing a framework:
Memo 12 — Children, Social Media and AI. The full case: what the law does, the three measurements of its first six months, why prohibition of a digital product does not hold, the national control system, AI in schools, and a table of where all five parties stand. With sources.