Meta has now removed access to more than 750,000 Facebook and Instagram accounts in Australia that it believes belong to people under 16, a sharp jump from the roughly 550,000 accounts the company had reported earlier in the year. This news highlights how Meta removes teen accounts in Australia due to new policies targeting users under the age requirement.
The number is big. What it actually says about the success of Australia’s social media restrictions is a little messier.
Australia’s under-16 rules have pushed social platforms into an unusually difficult position: they are expected to identify younger users at scale, block them from holding accounts and somehow avoid sweeping legitimate adult users into the same net. Meta says its systems are getting better at doing that. Australian regulators, meanwhile, still see plenty of holes.
Meta Says Its Teen Account Removals Are Still Growing
Meta reported that, as of June 30, 2026, it had removed access to more than 750,000 Australian accounts across Facebook and Instagram after assessing that the users were below the country’s minimum age of 16. More than 500,000 of those accounts had already been removed in the lead-up to Australia’s new rules taking effect, with additional accounts caught in the months that followed. Meta says the figure isn’t final either. Enforcement is ongoing, meaning the total will likely keep climbing.
That gives a sense of scale, but it also shows how different this kind of age enforcement is from a one-time purge. New accounts appear. Existing users change information. Some teenagers get through the checks. Others may try again after losing an account. Platforms aren’t really reaching a finish line here.
AI Is Doing More of the Age Guessing
A significant part of Meta’s newer enforcement relies on artificial intelligence rather than simply trusting the birthday entered when someone creates an account.
Meta says its systems look for contextual signals across profiles, including posts, comments, biographies and captions. A birthday celebration can provide a clue. So can references to school grades or other details that suggest the account belongs to somebody younger than 16. The company has also added AI-assisted review to reports of suspected underage accounts and strengthened systems designed to stop removed users from simply opening another profile.
That’s a very different model from asking, “How old are you?” and accepting the answer.
It also creates an awkward privacy question. The better platforms become at estimating someone’s age from ordinary online behavior, the more they are effectively interpreting the personal details people scatter across their accounts.
Parents and Other Users Can Flag Suspected Underage Accounts
Meta isn’t relying entirely on automated detection. It has also made suspected underage profiles easier for parents and other users to report through Facebook, Instagram and its help systems.
The company ran an education campaign in Australia during June and July that reached roughly 1.3 million people, explaining how under-16 accounts are detected and removed, what happens to account content and memories after enforcement, and how users can correct an inaccurate stated age. Meta also changed its Australian Apple App Store age rating to 16+.
None of those measures guarantee teenagers disappear from the platforms, of course. They simply add more points where an account can be caught.
Australia’s Social Media Ban Is Still Easy for Many Teens to Get Around
This is where the impressive-looking removal total starts to lose some shine.
Australia’s eSafety Commissioner has found that a substantial number of children under 16 are still using age-restricted social platforms despite the new rules. Earlier regulatory findings showed that millions of accounts had been removed, deactivated or restricted across the broader social media industry, yet many young Australians continued to retain accounts, create new ones or pass through age-assurance systems.
More recent reporting cited by Social Media Today put continued access to restricted apps among underage users at 81.5%. According to the regulator’s findings, one of the most common explanations was surprisingly mundane: many children said the platforms had simply never asked them to verify their age. Others said a platform had estimated their age incorrectly.
So Meta can remove three-quarters of a million accounts and the larger problem can still remain.
Both things can be true.
Meta Wants Age Verification Moved Away From Individual Apps
Meta has been pushing a different solution for months. Instead of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and every other service building separate age-checking systems, the company argues that a person’s age should be verified once through an operating system or app store.
In Meta’s version of the system, a reliable age signal could be generated when someone sets up a device or downloads an app. Platforms could then use that signal rather than repeatedly asking users to prove their age.
Meta says this would produce more consistent enforcement across competing services. It would also shift some responsibility away from individual social media companies — a detail regulators and platform operators will probably continue arguing over.
Australia Has Turned Age Verification Into a Real-World Test
Australia’s rules took effect on December 10, 2025, requiring major age-restricted platforms to take reasonable steps to stop Australians under 16 from creating or maintaining accounts. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, Threads, X, Reddit, Twitch and Kick are among the services covered by the regime.
Other governments are watching because Australia is effectively running one of the largest real-world experiments in social media age enforcement.
The early results aren’t tidy.
Millions of accounts can be removed while large numbers of teenagers remain active. AI can improve age detection while raising new questions about privacy and false positives. Regulations can force platforms to act without necessarily giving them one universally accepted method for figuring out who is actually 15 and who is 18.
Meta’s 750,000-account figure is still significant. It proves platforms can identify and remove underage accounts at a scale that would have seemed unlikely a few years ago.
Whether those users actually stay off social media is the part nobody has solved yet.