(Bloomberg) — Meta Platforms Inc. said it had shut down nearly 550,000 accounts in Australia to comply with the country’s historic ban on social networks for children.
The social media giant shut down about 330,000 Instagram accounts, 173,000 Facebook accounts, and nearly 40,000 Threads accounts belonging to people believed to be under 16 years of age, according to a post on its blog.
The law, which took effect on December 10, requires services such as ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok and Instagram to block under-16s from accessing their platforms, under penalties of up to A$49.5 million (US$33 million). It makes Australia the first democracy in the world to adopt such a stringent measure in response to growing concerns about the harms of social networks.
Nevertheless, Meta continued to express its opposition to the prohibition, arguing for standard age verification and more protections for youths across the industry, regardless of the apps they use, while also highlighting increases in downloads of alternative social platforms as a concern area.
That avoids the “whack-a-mole” effect of having to keep pace with new apps that teenagers will migrate to in order to circumvent the social-media prohibition law, Meta said in the post.
