Australia’s current social media experience offers Ireland an important warning.
More than 80% of Australian children aged 10–15 were still using social media three months after its under-16 restrictions took effect. Some retained existing accounts, supplied false ages or shifted towards messaging and gaming services. Parental awareness of children’s online activity also declined.
Ireland is considering age restrictions while developing a digital age-verification mechanism. However, copying Australia’s blanket ban could reproduce the same problems: circumvention, displacement to less-regulated services, intrusive identity checks and reduced communication between teenagers and parents. Ireland should instead build upon its existing regulatory system, which combines the EU Digital Services Act, the Online Safety and Media Regulation Act 2022 and Coimisiún na Meán’s Online Safety Code.
Ireland should undertake several connected measures:
- Expand digital and media literacy throughout primary and secondary education, including lessons on algorithms, misinformation, cyberbullying, privacy and reporting harmful material.
- Require social-media companies to make minors’ accounts private by default and prevent unknown adults from contacting them.
- Prohibit targeted advertising, location sharing and commercial profiling involving children.
- Restrict addictive design features such as endless scrolling, autoplay, streaks and overnight notifications.
- Give minors a chronological-feed option instead of automatically placing them under engagement-maximising recommendation systems.
- Require independent audits of platforms’ algorithms, age-assurance measures and child-safety outcomes.
- Introduce privacy-preserving age checks that confirm an age bracket without revealing a child’s full identity or retaining identification documents.
- Provide accessible guidance for parents while involving young people directly in policy design.
Ireland already requires certain platforms serving under-16s to offer parental controls, including tools for screen time, privacy, content and contact management.
The next step is to ensure that these protections are switched on automatically and independently tested, rather than leaving families to locate and configure them.
Young people should also be treated as participants in the solution. Ireland’s 2026 Youth Forum on Online Safety brought together approximately 100 people aged 10–17, offering a useful model for continuing consultation. Government of Ireland Policies developed with children are more likely to reflect how they actually use technology and how they might evade ineffective controls.
Australia currently shows that an age barrier alone cannot eliminate young people’s social-media use.
Ireland’s more appropriate course is therefore regulated, progressively independent access; strong default safeguards for younger users, increasing autonomy with age, sustained education and enforceable duties placed on the companies that design and profit from these platforms.
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