It’s only taken a few months for the cracks to appear in the Albanese government’s flagship social media ban.

At 13, I opened a Tumblr account where I taught myself how to blog, curate images, and build an audience. At 15, I built a My-Space page where I obsessively arranged music, aesthetics and opinions like a teenager editing a tiny cultural magazine. By 16, I had Facebook and Instagram. None of these spaces were perfectly safe. But they were formative. And eventually, this became my profession.

I encountered the internet in its messy, unfiltered form and learned – sometimes the hard way – how to navigate it.

Because, while the government has just spent the last few months congratulating itself on having closed those doors, our smart teenagers are already shimmying up the drainpipe and sneaking in through the window.

Let me be clear: I do not think social media is good for children. I’m no tech libertarian. Concerns from people like psychologist Jean Twenge and author Jonathan Haidt that show a link between smartphone and social media use and poor mental health of adolescents are worrying. These concerns are legitimate, and the impulse to act is understandable, but harm reduction and a blanket ban are not the same thing.

I am against bad policy and that is what this is.

The execution is the problem, and what we’ve ended up with is a law that any motivated 14-year-old can defeat with a VPN and three minutes to spare. Good intentions do not make for good policy and what this government has produced is not fit for purpose.

Getting the platforms to comply was always going to be the easy part, and sure enough, the government hit that target.

The Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024 took effect on December 10, 2025, threatening fines of up to A$49.5 million for platforms that failed to lock out under-16s. Over 4.7 million accounts were deactivated or blocked. Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant declared the ban to be ‘working’.

However, compliant platforms and rebellious teens are two very different things – and at the same age, no one was going to pry Tumblr or Instagram out of my hands.

No surprise then that industry data is showing that as many as one in five 13-to-15-year-olds are still active on TikTok and Snapchat alone. And that only captures what parental monitoring software can see. Once you factor in VPNs, borrowed accounts and biometric checks cleared with a parent’s face, the full picture is almost certainly worse. The government measured what was measurable and called it a win. Australia’s social media ban has become a filter that catches the compliant and waves through the resourceful.

This is the flaw the government has declined to confront. A ban that can be circumvented in three minutes does not remove teenagers from social media. It removes them from the parts of social media that are at least nominally regulated.

Push a 15-year-old off Instagram, and you do not push her offline. You push her toward less-governed alternatives – think smaller platforms, encrypted apps, and corners of the internet with no content moderation, no safety infrastructure, no adult oversight of any kind. The predators and the harmful content do not disappear. They relocate. And teenagers are attracted to this like a moth to a flame. But they’re now left without even the inadequate protections that the major platforms provide.

Consider what these platforms actually gave young people before the ban. YouTube built a generation of self-taught creators. Instagram gave young artists and small business owners a distribution channel that would have cost thousands of dollars a decade earlier. TikTok handed a microphone to kids with something to say. These were genuinely formative tools – the kind I used at 13 and 15.

The ban doesn’t distinguish between a 15-year-old watching eating disorder content and a 15-year-old building a photography portfolio. It treats both as problems to be removed – on the premise that baby boomer politicians know more about the internet than the teenagers living on it.

The Economist argued recently that young people have a right to share in new technologies, and that the obligation falls on adults to make that time online as safe and rewarding as possible. That is harder than legislation, but it is worth it. I can attest to that in my own career.

None of this is an argument to pretend the risks don’t exist. But teenagers now navigating around this ban are doing exactly what I did at 13: finding their way onto the internet regardless, learning its risks and rewards, and building something in the process. The difference is that I did it on platforms that at least had some guardrails. Today’s teens are increasingly doing it without any.

One hundred days into the ban, Australia has proved it can close official accounts on major platforms. What it hasn’t proved is that it can replace what those platforms gave young people, or that it even tried. The Albanese government should order an independent review of this legislation before it does any more damage: not to scrap it, but to replace a blunt ban with something that actually works. Smarter age verification. Platform accountability. Digital literacy in schools. Policies that follow young people into the spaces they occupy, rather than fences they simply climb over.

The internet shaped me. It will shape this generation too – with or without the government’s permission. The only question is whether adults are wise enough to help.