The figures released

Meta has published an account of its compliance with Australia's social media ban for users under 16. According to the company, as of 30 June 2026 it had removed access to more than 750,000 accounts on Facebook and Instagram that it assessed as belonging to people below the minimum age of 16.

That figure includes over 500,000 accounts removed in the run-up to the law taking effect, which the company reported in January, with the rest removed in the months since. The data covers 1 December 2025 to 30 June 2026. Meta says enforcement is ongoing and the numbers will continue to grow. It reports the figures to Australia's eSafety Commissioner and says it will keep publishing periodic public updates.

The method behind the numbers

The point Meta stresses is that identifying age online is not a single check but a continuing process. The company groups the improvements it made over the year under several headings:

  • AI-powered proactive detection: profiles, posts, comments, bios and captions are analysed for contextual clues that an account may belong to someone under 16. Birthday celebrations or mentions of school grades are among those clues.
  • Simplified reporting: it has become easier for parents and the wider community to report a suspected underage account, both inside the apps and through the help centres.
  • AI-driven review of reports: incoming reports are now supplemented by AI-driven review. Meta says this delivers higher accuracy and faster resolutions than human review alone.
  • Preventing re-registration: systems that detect and prevent someone creating a new account after their previous one was removed have been strengthened.
  • App store age rating: the Apple App Store age rating was updated to 16+ in Australia.

Informing families

Meta notes that enforcement is only part of the job. Between June and July the company ran an education campaign across Facebook and Instagram in Australia that reached approximately 1.3 million people. It pointed them to practical guidance on how under-16 accounts are detected and removed, what happens to a teen's account and the memories stored there, and how to check and correct a stated age.

The company's reasoning is that a young person using social media without a parent or guardian knowing is harder to support, not easier, and that keeping parents informed is part of making these protections work.

Why it matters

The Australian regulation is one of the first large-scale cases of a country making platforms enforce an age limit directly, and the outcome will be a reference point for similar debates elsewhere. The picture Meta presents shows two things at once: the scale of enforcement is genuinely large, but the centre of gravity of the method is not identity verification. It is AI inference over behaviour and text.

That distinction matters, because inference-based detection is probabilistic by definition. False positives can affect accounts of users who are over 16; false negatives leave behind accounts the ban was meant to cover. Meta putting the route to check and correct a stated age at the centre of its education campaign suggests that uncertainty is understood. Independent confirmation of the figures, meanwhile, rests on the reporting made to the eSafety Commissioner.