Social media: being cool means staying online

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Social media: being cool means staying online

Study shows the extent to which teenagers are bypassing Australia's social media ban - and why

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In Brief

• Compliance: Australia's ban on select social media platforms has yet to take hold. On the contrary: six months after coming into force, compliance among 14- to 15-year-olds has plummeted to just six percent, down from 27 percent in April.
• The takeaway: Legal measures alone are rarely enough to drive lasting changes in teenagers' social media habits.
• The power of FOMO: Bans require social buy-in, especially from key influencers and leaders within peer networks.

Australia has introduced one of the world's strictest social media laws: since December 2025, teens under 16 have been banned from holding personal accounts on major platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat. Yet the latest surveys show that young people are following the rules even less than they were just two months ago.

In one of the first studies on Australian usage habits, economist Christopher Roth of the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Economics, alongside an international research team, showed just how little impact the social media ban is having on teens - and how they are knowingly and wilfully bypassing it. Four months after the law took effect, a mere 27 percent of 14- and 15-year-olds were complying with the ban, according to surveys of roughly 970 teenagers aged 13 to 18 conducted in March and April 2026. This means nearly three-quarters of teens are continuing to use the platforms despite the ban, and that number is only growing.

Latest figures: ban not yet having an impact

In June 2026, Christopher Roth and Filip Milojević conducted a follow-up survey among 792 teenagers, 423 of whom had also participated in April. In their updated working paper, the researchers note that compliance was far lower in June than in April, with the overall compliance rate dropping to just six percent. "Six months after the regulations took effect, it's clear the law has yet to make a meaningful impact - in fact, usage has actually gone up," says Roth. Among 14- to 15-year-olds, the share of those who used a prohibited platform in the preceding seven days climbed from 64 percent in April to 92 percent in June. This is not due to a sample anomaly, either: the compliance rate collapsed even among the 93 teenagers surveyed across both waves.

Family and tech help teens break the rules

The research team demonstrated that teens are actively bypassing the ban with help from others. As Roth notes: "So far, all it takes to subvert the law is a fake birthdate, a VPN connection routed outside Australia, or using a sibling's - or even a parent's -account." Three out of four teenagers (75 percent) consider it easy or very easy to bypass the ban, and among 60 percent of 14- to 15-year-olds, not a single account has been deleted to date. What's more, just over one in five (22 percent) of those who continue to use the platforms report that parents, older siblings, or other adults helped them set up a new account after their original one was deactivated.

FOMO outweighs mental health concerns

The researchers also show that while age-based bans can make accessing platforms harder, their success depends heavily on social dynamics. A critical factor is whether friends and classmates remain active on the platform. "The cool kids stay," Roth notes regarding the latest figures. At the heart of this is peer pressure - and the pervasive phenomenon known as FOMO, the "fear of missing out". "Anyone who quits Insta, TikTok, and the like while their friends are still on there pays the price in lost social connection," Roth explains. Peer behaviour, he emphasises, is the deciding factor.

The researchers also asked participants at what dropout rate they themselves would quit the platforms. On average, the answer was around two-thirds (66 percent). "We haven't reached that threshold yet - not even in our second survey," says Roth. On the contrary: 44 percent of those who initially quit said they would return if only a third of their peers came back. And that is precisely what happened. In the June survey, half of the teenagers reported leaving at least one banned platform at first, only to return once they realised most others were carrying on as normal.

What's more, 63 percent noted that more of their friends were using social media now than a month earlier. The reason? "Our results show that those who quit complied with the ban because they assumed enough others would do the same - not because they found the law convincing," Roth explains. Teenagers actually had a remarkably clear picture of real-world compliance, estimating the rate at 30 percent compared to the 27 percent observed by researchers. Clearly, young people are well aware that the vast majority of their peers are continuing to scroll through these platforms.

Obeying the ban is uncool

Another social factor is status. When asked whether teens who leave these platforms are viewed as more or less popular, respondents gave a clear answer: a mere four percent considered those who quit to be more popular, while 45 percent viewed them as less popular. For the remaining 51 percent, it made no difference. Fittingly, teenagers who keep using social media have roughly 1.5 times as many Instagram followers as those who stopped (366 compared to 201).

"There's no social prestige in following the rules," Roth explains. Influential teens shape the behaviour of their peers. "As long as stepping away isn't socially rewarded and doesn't become the norm within one's own network, the law lacks social backing," says Roth, drawing a parallel to tobacco regulations.

In the 1980s and 1990s, well-connected social groups in the US and the UK gave up smoking. Those who kept lighting up found themselves pushed to the margins of their peer groups. "The social signal followed state regulation - a dynamic currently nowhere to be seen in Australia."

The research team includes economists Leonardo Bursztyn, Aaron Leonard and Filip Milojević (all from the University of Chicago), Rafael Jiménez-Durán (Bocconi University in Milan), psychologist Angela Duckworth (University of Pennsylvania) and legal scholar Cass Sunstein (Harvard Law School

Lessons for the German and European debate

An age limit for social media access is currently being debated in Germany and across the EU as well. Teenagers themselves prefer milder measures: 72 percent would rather use an app that limits their daily screen time than submit to an outright ban.

In an op-ed for the FAZ, economists Matthias Sutter, Christopher Roth, and Filip Milojević outlined what effective youth protection really requires:

• Ensure technical protection: Providing reliable sign-up procedures without workarounds, along with regular audits, is the responsibility of platform operators. As long as loopholes exist, they will continue to be exploited.
• Think in terms of grade cohorts: In Australia, 14- to 16-year-olds often share a single classroom. Drawing the line strictly by birth year misses the lived reality of teenagers and inevitably leads to non-compliance.
• Build positive role models: A ban requires real-world grounding through education, visible role models, and a broader public debate that makes early social media use less normalised. Smoking bans only took effect after decades of medical evidence, public campaigns, and shifting social norms.
• Provide alternatives: For many young people, social media is central to their sense of identity, a key digital network, and a filler for downtime between school, homework, and bed. Without real-world alternatives like sports, music, youth clubs, and recreational activities, the feed will always stay more appealing. Families and educational institutions alike must step up.
• Benefits for younger children: For today's teens, the ban comes too late. But if consistent and credible enforcement succeeds, younger children may grow up in a world where having a personal account under 16 is no longer the default.

"Anyone who wants to change young people's media habits needs to convince the teenagers themselves - and the trendsetters in their social circles," says Christopher Roth.