Within a Westernised digital society, social media is a highly prevalent and pervasive part of our lives. There are many good things about social media, such as enabling us to stay connected with peers, build networks, and find and share information. However, there are also less helpful or functional uses for social media, including exposure to targeted advertising and the consumption of harmful or inappropriate content.
Concerns regarding social media use often focus on potential impacts on mental health, particularly for young people (Keles et al., 2019). Young people have been noted to spend significant amounts of time on platforms such as Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat, with more than 90% of young people aged 13-18 years reporting using social media often for more than three hours a day (Children’s Commissioner for England, 2022).
However, research on how social media use might relate to mental health remains highly variable. That is, many studies fail to show any compelling effects of social media use on mental health (Ferguson et al., 2024; Vuorre et al., 2021; see Amanda and Louise’s Mental Elf blog for more information) and thus the evidence remains too mixed, or lacks the methods needed to conclude causal, long-term impact (Odgers & Jensen, 2020; Orben, 2020).
Despite this lack of evidence, pressures have mounted regarding better governmental and industrial regulation and safeguarding for young people when using social media. One such approach taken recently by the Australian government was the Social Media Minimum Age Act 2024, which established a national minimum age of 16 years for holding accounts on designated social media platforms.
This study by Barnes and colleagues (2026) is the first to document the early effects of this legislation to explore the extent to which it has been effective in reducing social media account ownership and usage behaviour in 12 to <17-year-olds. Additionally, the authors explore young people’s experience of age verification strategies, and any methods in efforts to circumvent account restriction.
Methods
The authors collected data about social media use from young people aged 12 to <17 years old before and after (3 months) the Australian Social Media Minimum Age Act 2024 was implemented. Participants were recruited online, and provided data on daily social media use, time spent per day on social media, use of restricted platforms and exposure to age verification systems, circumvention, and perceived displacement or substitution behaviours (i.e., behaviours replacing time previously spent on social media). The researchers used a regression discontinuity design, comparing adolescents close to either side of the age-16 policy threshold. This allowed them to estimate the effect of being subject to the Act, regardless of whether individual adolescents or platforms fully complied with it.
Results
The sample included 436 young people, with a mean age of 14.33 years (SD = 1.48) and 54% identifying as female. Most participants lived in major cities (84%) and were born in Australia (94%). The majority of the sample provided data at 3-months (94%).
Both daily social media use (~50%) and time spent using social media were similar between baseline and follow-up for those in the 12–13-year group. In contrast, for those in the 14–15-year group, reductions were reported both for daily social media use (78% down to 69%) and time spent using social media. Finally, for those in the ≥16-year group, although daily social media use was reported to increase (80% to 89%), time spent using social media remained similar between time-points. When exploring how the age threshold of 16 related to differences in social media use between baseline and 3-month follow-up, there was limited evidence to indicate this was different, both in relation to daily use of social media and time spent using social media per day.
Interestingly, at 3-months follow-up, more than 86% of participants aged under 16 had accessed one or more of the social media platforms subject to the Act in the last seven days. 66% of those had come across age verification systems. Only small reductions were noted between baseline and follow-up in reported access, daily access, and number of restricted platforms accessed among participants of all age groups.
Strategies used by young people to access restricted platforms included using someone else’s account, a fake account, or a private browser. Only 2-3% reported using a proxy server or virtual network provider (VPN). Generally, more young people reported spending more time on messaging apps than those who responded spending less time; more young people reported spending less time using AI companions than those who responded spending more time; and more young people reported spending more time in outdoor play and recreation than those who reported spending less time. Time spent online gaming or using platforms not subject to the Act were similar.
Conclusions
The findings suggest that, in the first three months after implementation, the Australian Social Media Minimum Age Act 2024 had not produced clear substantial reductions in adolescents’ reported social media use. However, the findings are uncertain and may partly reflect incomplete implementation and compliance, rather than showing that age-based regulation itself is ineffective. These early findings are important for other countries who have proposed similar restrictions in the future (e.g., UK, Indonesia).
Strengths and limitations
A strength of this research was its ability to offer early evidence of a hotly debated topic based on real-world, naturally occurring data, which makes it highly relevant to policy on an international scale. However, arguably this was not purely observational in the sense that the primary outcome of “social media use” was not observed directly but instead captured via participant self-reports of their behaviour. In this sense, the study examined the effect of the legislation on young people’s self-reported social media use, rather than objectively measured behaviour. This is an important distinction given the caution noted in the literature about self-reported measurement of social media and other digital use lacking accuracy of objective behaviour (see Parry et al., 2021 for review).
The regression discontinuity design and prespecified analyses strengthen the study, and it was encouraging to see such a high retention rate at follow-up. However, the recruitment strategy and composition of the sample may limit its representativeness, with most participants living in major cities and having been born in Australia. The study was also somewhat underpowered and the estimates were imprecise, with wide confidence intervals. The absence of statistically detectable effects should therefore not be interpreted as strong evidence that the Act had no effect. There were also some useful statistical approaches used in this research which might be a suitable basis for replication studies exploring similar social media restrictions in other countries. This could provide some useful comparative analysis.
However, I feel that a limitation of this research is the measurement of the primary outcomes (i.e., “daily social media use” and “time spent per day using social media”). Closer scrutiny of the measurements for social media use relating to daily social media use and time spent per day using social media (“Use 1” and “Use 2”) indicates that participants were asked questions such as: “In the past 7 days, how often have you used social media?” and “On an average day, how many hours do you spend on social media? (such as Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, or YouTube)?”. In neither of these cases is there specificity on how usage might relate to restricted versus non-restricted platforms as outlined in the Act. It is conceivable that some participants might have been considering platforms such as WhatsApp or other non-restricted platforms as a reference point when answering these questions. This is illustrated by research which highlights that people’s perceptions of what constitutes social media can be rather varied (Murray et al., 2026). As such, it would be difficult to unpick how participants’ reported social media use related specifically to specific restricted platforms as per the Act. However, other questions on the survey in respect of platform (“Platform 1” and “Platform 2”) and access (“Access 1”, “Access 2” and “Access 3”) did offer specificity in this respect. As such, there are implications regarding some aspects of the scale perhaps being more enlightening towards answering the research question than others.
Another limitation is that it is not clear on the longer-term impacts of restrictions, and whether behaviours around social media use and access may take more time to change based on changes in social norms or similar. The three-month follow-up only captures the immediate effects of the legislation. Encouragingly, the researchers have planned a 12-month follow-up, which should provide more information about whether behaviours change as implementation and social norms evolve.
Implications for practice
Given social media restrictions are often positioned in the context of protecting young people in an effort to support mental health, it is unclear from this research whether this would indeed be achievable. Restrictions targeted specifically at platform access are unlikely to be sufficient on their own to address concerns about young people’s mental health. This study found little evidence of substantial reductions in social media use during the first three months, but it cannot establish whether better-implemented restrictions or longer-term policy effects might produce different outcomes. This has key implications for other countries which are currently proposing or indeed implementing similar restrictions. Crucially, this study did not measure mental health outcomes, so it cannot tell us whether the Act benefits, harms, or has no effect on young people’s mental health. More broadly, there is currently insufficient evidence to know whether these types of government-led restrictions reduce mental ill-health. For other countries which are implementing social media restrictions and assessing their effectiveness, it would be useful for research to follow agreed protocols with regards to standardised measurements so there is cross-national comparability across evaluations. Additionally, it would be useful for these measurements to include mental health or other relevant psychological variables, given mental ill-health has been a key driver for social media restrictions in the first place.
Statement of interests
Linda Kaye does not have any conflicts of interest to declare but wants to note specific interests for transparency. She has written position papers and authored meta-analyses on topics that have scrutinised the academic knowledge relating to social media use, some of which are included in her review and thus should alert readers to her own informed perspectives on this topic.
Edited by
Dr Nina Higson-Sweeney.
Links
Primary paper
Courtney Barnes, Alix Hall, Stephanie Mantach, Christopher Oldmeadow, John Attia, Kathryn Backholer, Carmel Williams, Yonatal Tefera, Frances Kay, & Luke Wolfenden (2026). Assessing early effects of Australia’s Social Media Minimum Age Act on adolescents’ social media use: observational study. BMJ, 393, e363695 https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj-2026-363695
Other references
Children’s Commissioner for England (2022). Digital childhoods: a survey of children and parents. 2022. https://www.childrenscommissioner.gov.uk/resource/digital-childhoods-a-survey-of-children-and-parents/
Keles, B., McCrae, N., & Grealish, A. (2020). A systematic review: the influence of social media on depression, anxiety and psychological distress in adolescents. International Journal of Adolescence and Youth, 25(1), 79-93. https://doi.org/10.1080/02673843.2019.1590851
Ferguson, C. J., Kaye, L. K., Branley-Bell, D & Markey, P. (2024). There is No Evidence that Social Media Use is Correlated with Adolescent Mental health problems: Findings From a Meta-analysis. Professional Psychology: Research and Practice 56 (1), 73–83
Odgers, C.L., & Jensen, M.R (2020). Annual Research Review: Adolescent Mental Health in the Digital Age: Facts, Fears, and Future Directions. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 61 (3), 336-348. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcpp.13190
Orben, A. (2020). Teenagers, Screens and Social Media: A Narrative Review of Reviews and Key Studies. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 55, 407-414. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00127-019-01825-4
Murray, E. A. H., Larkin, M., Shaw, D. J., & Pennington, C. R. (2026). Exploring public perceptions of social media: A preregistered mixed-methods study. Psychology of Popular Media. https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/ppm0000680
Parry, D., Davidson, B. I., Sewall, C., Fisher, J. T., Mieczkowski, H., & Quintana, D. S. (2021). A systematic review and meta-analysis of discrepancies between logged and self-reported digital media use. Nature Human Behavior, 5, 1535–1547. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01117-5
Sabo, A., & La Sala, L. (2025). Critical lack of evidence about social media use and youth mental health in clinical populations. The Mental Elf.
Vuorre, M., Orben, A., & Przybylski, A. K. (2021). There Is No Evidence That Associations Between Adolescents’ Digital Technology Engagement and Mental Health Problems Have Increased. Clinical Psychological Science, 9 (5), 823-835. https://doi.org/10.1177/2167702621994549
