PARIS, FRANCE – DECEMBER 14: In this photo image, the logos of the apps Street View, Google Earth, Google Maps, Gmail, YouTube, Hangouts, Google, Gmail, Chrome, Google News, Drive, Google Earth and Chrome appear on the screen of an iPhone on December 14, 2020 in Paris, France. A global bug has affected Google services since midday. An unprecedented incident: most Google services, including YouTube and Gmail messaging, experienced a major global outage on Monday, December 14 at noon. Google said on its web-accessible dashboard that all of its services were affected, and that for the “majority of users.” (Photographic illustration by Chesnot/Getty Images)
Getty Images
“The kids are all laughing about it, ‘What a joke, nothing has been taken away from us.'” These are the words of Lauren Hillier, a 42-year-old mother of two teenagers from Australia. Hillier was describing the effects of Australia’s Social Media Minimum Age Act to the New York Times.
Legendary Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis (1856-1941) must be smiling from above. His embrace of the 50 US states as “laboratories” revealed his brilliant self once again, albeit on a global scale.
In 2024 Australia passed the Social Media Minimum Age Act. It mandated a strict minimum age of 16 for teenagers to have social media accounts, as well as requiring social media companies to control access to their apps, while exempting parents from oversight responsibility.
The law went into effect in December 2025 and as you read this the effects of the law are beginning to unfold. It’s not positive, like his report New York Times indicates. It turns out that laws are no substitute for parental supervision, a truth any sentient being could have conveyed to Australian lawmakers.
Like the Times went on to report that once the minimum age social media law was implemented, teenagers were quick to make “easy countermeasures” to get back on social media. This includes “drawing a mustache on their face for an age estimate scan, creating a new account with a fake date of birth, or using a parent or older sibling’s account.”
The failure of the Social Media Minimum Age Act will hopefully be seen as a lesson to lawmakers in US states where passage of similar laws has been hit, not to mention Representative John James (R-MI) and Senator Mike Lee (R-UT), as they try to pass a national law (the App Store Accountability Act) that, as has been done by Apple’s parents in Australia. and other creators of popular devices that young people access on social media. Australia exists as an extremely cautionary tale about attempts to replace parenting with legislation.
It just won’t work. If anything, it will make the kids worse. Australia again instructs.
While Australian parents used to have more control over smartphones and other devices, including the ability to police accounts their children opened, closing those accounts put Australians under 16 in a position where they have to break the law to access social media, often without parental consent.
Not only do laws not replace the genius of parenting, but neither do the markets themselves. Kids want to be on social media and a law won’t change that. It will simply cause young people to lose respect for the law as they work around it, often without their parents’ knowledge.
This is arguably the biggest point. While it is almost certain that the majority of Australian parents continued to control social media use even after the Social Media Minimum Age Act was implemented, we cannot suggest that other parents, confident that the law and the app store are doing their job, have stopped the tighter oversight that prevailed before the law. The results are in once again and they are not good.
Were he alive today, Brandeis would surely advise American lawmakers to view Australia as an informative, if unofficial 51St situation. As he explained, “new social and economic experiments” are best left to states “without risk to the rest of the country.” App Store Age Verification tried and failed. American lawmakers take note.
