// age verification

Source: The Guardian

Australia's under-16 social media ban, in effect for three months, has largely failed in practice. Eighty percent of affected teens remain active on platforms, primarily because age verification systems are trivial to circumvent. The gap is clear: regulation designed for political optics cannot overcome technical and behavioral reality. Platform bans on minors require either genuinely reliable identity verification (which doesn't exist at scale) or friction severe enough to trigger consumer backlash. For brands marketing to Gen Z, the outcome is operational continuity—teens remain accessible where they were before, but with eroded trust in institutional authority.