On December 10, 2025, Australia quietly became the first nation to roll out a blanket ban preventing anyone under 16 from holding social media accounts, a heavy-handed experiment in social engineering pushed by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his allies. What the government calls “protection” looks a lot like a new power to dictate how children and families live their lives, and Americans watching should take notice of how fast a free society can be nudged toward permanent surveillance.
The list of platforms swept up in the crackdown reads like a who’s who of modern life — Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, X and others now face the choice of policing their users or paying penalties up to A$49.5 million if regulators say they haven’t done enough. Tens or even hundreds of thousands of teenagers have already been affected, and the mandate forces companies into the role of age police rather than preserving the open internet that fuels entrepreneurship and free expression.
The mechanics of enforcement make the whole policy smell of futility and risk: regulators expect platforms to rely on AI age estimators, optional ID checks and other invasive tools that will never be perfect and will create rich privacy headaches. Tech firms admit it will be difficult to catch everyone, and security experts warn that pushing kids and parents to hand over IDs or fall back on easily-broken workarounds will only open the door to fraud, phishing and a thriving underground of cloak-and-dagger apps.
Parents and teens are split — some relieved at a hand from the state against addiction and cyberbullying, others furious that governments are rearranging their family decisions and cutting off young creators who use platforms to earn or promote legitimate businesses. Reports of accounts being deactivated and kids scrambling for VPNs or alternative apps are already piling up, a predictable consequence when lawmakers think they can legislate away human behavior without fixing the root causes.
Conservatives should applaud any effort to protect kids from real harms, but we must also resist the instinct to hand the state new surveillance powers and let Big Government decide which families deserve discretion. ID checks and algorithmic age-gates set a dangerous precedent that other governments will emulate, and if Western democracies don’t defend parental rights, free speech and privacy now, the price will be paid by our children down the road. Americans should watch December 10, 2025 as a cautionary tale — protect kids, yes, but empower parents, not bureaucrats.
