Meta said on January 12, 2026, that it had deactivated 544,052 Australian accounts believed to belong to users under 16 as it complied with the country’s new social-media age restriction. The removals covered Instagram, Facebook and Threads and followed the law’s entry into force on December 10, 2025.
The company reported that the action took place between December 4 and 11. Instagram accounted for 330,639 deactivated accounts, Facebook for 173,497 and Threads for 39,916. The figures reflected accounts Meta believed were operated by underage users, rather than a count independently verified in the supplied report.
Australia’s measure requires major platforms, including Meta services, TikTok and YouTube, to prevent children younger than 16 from holding accounts. Companies that fail to comply can face penalties of as much as 49.5 million Australian dollars, which the report put at about €28.4 million or US$33 million.
Meta said it would follow the law while continuing to object to its design. The company argued that determining a person’s age online remained difficult without a common industry standard. It called for privacy-preserving and age-appropriate experiences across the sector rather than what it described as blanket bans.
The group renewed its proposal that app stores should verify users’ ages and obtain parental approval before young people download applications. In Meta’s view, placing checks at the distribution point would create more consistent protections across competing services and reduce the likelihood that teenagers simply move to new apps outside the initial group covered by enforcement. The Australian policy instead places obligations on individual social-media platforms.
The scale and distribution of Meta’s removals offered an early measure of the ban’s operational impact. They also showed that Instagram carried the largest share of the company’s identified under-16 accounts during the reported period. The data did not establish how many individual children were represented, whether any person held accounts on multiple services or how many deactivation decisions could be challenged.
Australia’s approach had attracted international attention, with advocates elsewhere praising the age threshold and governments, including Germany’s, considering related measures. Meta’s response illustrated the central implementation dispute: authorities sought a clear prohibition for younger users, while platforms argued that age verification should be standardised and applied at a broader technical layer. As of the January 12 report, the company had completed the stated wave of deactivations but had not withdrawn its policy objections.
