Australia social media ban: Meta wants a single age check

This article was published on August 14, 2026 Meta removed 756,000 accounts under the Australia social media ban. The line that matters sits in its final paragraph, where Meta asks that Apple and Google do the age checking instead. Representatives of Meta, TikTok, Google and Snap give evidence to an Australian parliamentary inquiry on Friday, Reuters reported. Regulators and government officials appear too. Meta went first, and it went alone. On Wednesday it published its enforcement figures on its own newsroom, covering 1 December 2025 to 30 June 2026. No other platform has released compliance data covering the same period. Read the post to the end and the argument changes shape. Meta says its “primary concern is that platforms are not taking a consistent approach to how they are removing teens”. Then comes the proposal. “There should be a single reliable age signal delivered at the operating system or app store level,” the company writes. Age “could be verified once, when a young person sets up their device or downloads an app, rather than repeatedly across the dozens of apps they use”. That is a policy position, not a compliance update. It would move the age check off the social