“The kids all laugh about it, ‘What a joke, we haven’t been taken off anything.’” Those are the words of Lauren Hillier, a 42-year-old mother of two Australian teens. Hillier was describing the effects of Australia’s Social Media Minimum Age Act to the New York Times.
Legendary Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis (1856-1941) must be smiling from above. His embrace of the 50 U.S. states as “laboratories” has revealed its brilliant self yet again, albeit globally.
In 2024 Australia passed the Social Media Minimum Age Act. It mandated a strict minimum age of 16 for teens to have social media accounts, plus it required social media companies to vet access to their apps while freeing parents of oversight responsibility.
The law went into effect in December of 2025, and as you’re reading this the results of the law are starting to reveal themselves. They’re not positive, as the reporting of the New York Times indicates. It turns out laws are no replacement for parental oversight, a truth that any sentient being could have conveyed to Aussie lawmakers.
As the Times went on to report, once the Social Media Minimum Age Act was implemented, teenagers quickly happened on “easy workarounds” to get back onto social media. This including “drawing a mustache on their face for an age estimation scan, creating a new account with a fake birth date, or using a parent or older sibling’s account.”
The failure of the Social Media Minimum Age Act will hopefully be viewed as a lesson for lawmakers in U.S. states where passage of similar laws are being bruited, not to mention for Rep. John James (R-MI), and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), as they try to pass a national law (App Store Accountability Act) that, as has been the case in Australia, will free parents of app store oversight in favor of policing by Apple, Google, and other creators of popular devices on which young people access social media. Australia exists as a highly cautionary tale about efforts to replace parenting with legislation.
It just won’t work. If anything, it will render kids worse off. Australia instructs yet again.
While Australian parents formerly had a greater degree of control over smartphones and other devices, including the ability to police accounts opened by their children, the closing of those accounts has put pre-16 Australians in a position where they have to break the law to access social media, frequently without parental consent.
Not only do laws not replace the genius of parenting, they also don’t replace markets themselves. Kids want to be on social media, and a law won’t change that. It will just cause young people to lose respect for the law as they work around it, frequently unbeknownst to their parents.
Which is arguably the bigger point. While it’s near certain that a majority of Australian parents have continued to police social media usage even after the implementation of the Social Media Minimum Age Act, it’s no reach to suggest that other parents, confident that the law and app store are doing their work for them, have ceased the closer oversight that prevailed before the law. The results are once again in, and they’re not good.
Were he alive today, Brandeis would surely counsel U.S. lawmakers to view Australia as an informative, albeit informal 51st state. As he explained it, “novel social and economic experiments” are best left to the states “without risk to the rest of the country.” App Store Age Verification has been tried, and it failed. U.S. legislators beware.
