Australia’s regulator says it cannot prove a breach without the platforms’ own documents
A Senate committee backed doubling the maximum fine to A$109.2 million, after the eSafety Commissioner told it that children still holding accounts is not, by itself, evidence of anything.
On 25 August 2026 an Australian Senate committee recommended passing a bill that would double the maximum fine for breaching the country’s under-16 social media ban and let its regulator demand internal documents from platforms, age-check providers and app stores.
The reason is a gap the eSafety Commissioner, Julia Inman Grant, spelled out at a hearing on 14 August. Proving a platform has broken the ban is not a matter of counting children. “To establish a breach of the social media minimum age obligation, it is not enough to show that under-16s have accounts on the platform,” she told the committee. “We must demonstrate that the platform failed to take reasonable steps to prevent underage users from having accounts.” That evidence sits in company policies, technical documentation and compliance records, and under the law as it stands, eSafety can require platforms to answer questions but cannot make them hand the documents over.
Introducing the bill, the communications minister, Anika Wells, said five platforms were being investigated for non-compliance: Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube. The bill raises the maximum penalty for a company from 30,000 to 60,000 penalty units, which works out at A$109.2 million once the multiplier for corporations is applied. It passed Australia’s lower house on 1 July and now returns to the Senate.
The specific hole Australia is patching does not look like a UK problem. Ofcom’s information powers under section 100 of the Online Safety Act already define “information” to include documents, and already allow notices to be sent to people other than the platform itself. How those powers attach to the new under-16 duties is a question for the regulations due before Parliament by Christmas.
The harder half of Australia’s lesson does travel. The legal test here will also be whether a platform took reasonable steps, not whether every child was kept out, which means enforcement will be slow, document-heavy and largely invisible to families. Our ban hub tracks where the UK rules have got to.
When the UK ban starts in spring 2027, your child still having an account will not mean a platform is breaking the law, and it is not something you are expected to report or police. The duty is on the companies. The controls on your own devices are the part you actually govern. Oursetup guides cover the free ones.