Coverage spread: 2 sources — 2 international
Lean ratings via AllSides / Media Bias-Fact-Check. How this works.
Where they agree
- Both outlets report on the same eSafety finding that most Australian teens remain on social media despite the under-16 ban.
- Both identify the ban as a landmark, world-first policy that took effect roughly three months before the report.
Where they differ
- Al Jazeera provides extensive detail — specific percentages, reasons cited by teens, and a direct government rebuttal from minister Andrew Leigh — while no article text was available for Sky News World to compare.
- It is therefore unclear whether Sky News emphasized different aspects of the story, such as industry response or international reaction, since its content could not be reviewed.
What the new report found
Australia’s internet regulator, eSafety, has published a study concluding that more than eight in 10 Australian teenagers are still using social media three months after the country’s world-first ban on platforms for under-16s took effect. The ban began on December 10 last year. According to the report, released on a Friday in early August, nearly 86 percent of children surveyed said they used at least one age-restricted platform before the ban; three months later that figure had only dropped to just above 81 percent.
The report also found daily use barely changed, with about 58 percent of teenagers saying they used social media every day, down only slightly from roughly 60 percent before the ban. eSafety said there was minimal shift in other areas of teenagers’ lives that the ban was meant to encourage, such as time spent on sports, arts and music, socializing with friends and family, or attending community events. Notably, the study also found that parents’ awareness of their children’s social media habits had decreased since the ban began.
Why the ban isn’t working as intended
eSafety pinned the blame largely on tech companies, saying most under-16s who already had accounts before the ban were able to keep them, and children without accounts were often able to create new ones. The regulator cited platforms’ failure to put in place effective age-checking systems as the main reason the ban has been so easy to circumvent.
About half of the children who managed to hold onto their accounts said the platforms never checked their age at all. Others reported that their accounts were already listed as belonging to someone 16 or older, or that automated age-verification tools had simply gotten their age wrong, incorrectly judging them old enough to stay on the service.
How the government is responding
The findings put the government in the position of defending a signature policy that was meant to protect children’s mental and physical health from the effects of social media. Andrew Leigh, Australia’s assistant minister for productivity, competition, charities and treasury, was pressed on the report’s results in a televised interview on Saturday. He argued the ban has still succeeded in changing the national conversation, calling it “an important game changer” for parents, and pointed out that “millions of accounts” have been shut down since it began.
Leigh also pushed back on the idea that partial compliance means the law has failed, comparing it to minimum drinking-age laws, which he noted are never followed with 100 percent compliance either but remain justified and kept on the books.
Why this is being watched closely
Australia was the first country in the world to impose a blanket ban of this kind on social media for children under 16, and its rollout is being closely tracked by other governments that are weighing similar restrictions of their own. The early results — showing that a large majority of underage users have simply found workarounds — raise questions for other countries about whether age-verification technology is mature enough to make such bans effective, or whether new enforcement approaches will be needed for the policy to deliver the outcomes it promises.
How the coverage compares
Al Jazeera’s account is the more detailed of the two sources reviewed here, laying out the eSafety figures, the reasons children gave for keeping their accounts, and the government’s defense of the policy in full. Sky News World covered the same story but no article text was available for comparison, so it isn’t possible to say whether its emphasis or details differed from Al Jazeera’s reporting.
Sources
Featured photo: Joshua Tagicakibau via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)