(Bloomberg) -- Australia will soon ban its youth from popular services like TikTok and Instagram, becoming the world's first democracy to carry out such a crackdown in response to growing concerns about social media's harms. It's likely to be the first of many.
The platforms will be required by law to block under-16s from holding accounts from Dec. 10, with companies that don't comply facing fines of up to A$49.5 million ($32 million).
The measures are spurring an increasing number of governments to seek to hold social media firms to account for toxic content and cyberbullying. Interviews with policymakers from Jakarta to Copenhagen and Brasilia show they're watching the rollout in Australia closely and planning moves of their own to protect young users, a crucial demographic for Big Tech.
"I was super envious when they announced it," said Caroline Stage Olsen, Denmark's minister for digital affairs. "Fundamentally, it's a really important step."
While figures on the number of under-16s on social media globally are scarce, research firm EMarketer says about one in ten US users are under 18. In some populous emerging markets like Brazil, under-18s make up nearly one in five.
User numbers, as well as time spent on platforms, are critical for social media firms because advertising accounts for the bulk of their sales. Curtailing teens' access could jeopardize a portion of the more than $245 billion EMarketer estimates the industry will make this year from over 4 billion users worldwide.
Australia's success as a trailblazer is far from assured, with technology experts cautioning that teenagers are likely to find ways to skirt the rules. But if forced to wait until they're older to join, some may end up bypassing the services altogether.
"As more governments look to tighten social media age limits, this could lead to a global patchwork of age assurance or verification rules for platforms," said Abigail Chen of political and regulatory consultancy Flint Global. "This fragmentation would make compliance more costly and challenging."
Meta Platforms Inc., which owns Facebook and Instagram, promised to comply with the new law but says there are better solutions for parents to have more control over kids' access, that the ban will difficult to implement and that it risks leading children to darker corners of the internet. TikTok-owner ByteDance Ltd. has also said it will follow the law but argued that age bans are ineffective. Meanwhile, both Snap Inc. and Google's YouTube have rejected their classification as social media platforms, though the former said it will comply with the new law. Google and Elon Musk's X didn't respond to requests for comment on whether they would comply.