Locked out of Snapchat! "The Latest on The Social Media Ban" (Minimum Age Law)

I am in regional New South Wales, working onsite at school with young people and watching, in real time, how platform decisions actually impact their lives. This helps inform all of the policy work I do, which is increasing daily at the moment because there is so much change moving through this space at once.

Yesterday I spoke with a group of delightful Year 11 and 12 students as one of six sessions I delivered at Scone Grammar. In my first session of the day, all of them except one were over sixteen, and many had woken up to find themselves completely locked out of Snapchat. Not restricted. Not warned. Removed. They had tried to appeal. They had tried to verify their age. The system failed instantly. The message was blunt. Too many attempts. Try again later. Except later did not work either.

That is not an appeal process at all; it is a closed loop. And it is the part Snapchat has to answer for because the conversation around this gets noisy very quickly, and I do not want anyone misreading what I am saying.

This is not a failure of the regulatory framework or of the eSafety Commissioner or her office, who are doing exactly what Australians asked of them. The framework is working. The pressure has finally landed with Snapchat and others who have been formally put on notice. The platforms are finally moving.

For years, we asked these companies to take the safety of Australian children seriously, and for years, we were told it could not be done. Too complex. Too technical. Too commercially difficult. And then a regulator with teeth walked into the room, put a date on the calendar, and suddenly the impossible became operationally urgent. That is what enforcement looks like when it is done properly.

The regulatory position is clear: social media platforms must not access Australian children under 16. They must enforce age restrictions. And critically, they must provide fair, accessible, and functioning appeal pathways for users who have been wrongfully locked out. That obligation sits squarely with the platform, not the regulator, not the schools, not the parents, and certainly not the seventeen-year-olds standing in front of me yesterday, wondering why they had been treated like the children they are not. Interestingly, the only people locked out who were over the age of 16 years were also only girls.

What I assume we are watching with Snapchat is a platform scrambling to correct earlier non-compliance now that the regulator has put them on notice. The compliance threat has worked. They are cleaning up their act. Good. That is the system functioning as intended. I expect a couple of the other platforms will be coming to the party shortly as well, so we must continue to prepare kids for the fact that it could all be gone tomorrow.

But here is where Snapchat has to bear the consequences of its own execution. Since the 10th of December, platforms have been expected to actively prevent underage access. Snapchat has been under significant pressure to demonstrate it is doing exactly that. What I saw yesterday was the noisy by-product of a reactive moment. Tech overreach from a company that rushed to look compliant rather than building the precision the rules actually require, and that they have known about for more than 12mths. Representatives from Snapchat were present on every call as stakeholders during the meeting I attended as a part of the Age Assurance Technology Trial Advisory Board as observers. They knew what they had to do. They all did.

I am willing to assume technical overreach here rather than malicious intent. That feels like the fair read. But fair read or not, it does not let Snapchat off the hook, because the rules they are scrambling to comply with on one side are the same rules that require a working appeal process on the other side. They do not get to pick the half they like.

There is another layer to this that I cannot ignore. The students themselves demonstrated something to me yesterday, calmly and methodically, almost like forensic investigators. The restriction appears to be tied not just to accounts but to IP-level blocking. When locked-out users moved to a different device or a different network, in some cases, they regained access. That strongly suggests the system is applying network-based restrictions rather than clean, account-level verification.

IP-based blocking is inherently imprecise. It does not distinguish well between individuals, particularly in shared environments like homes, schools, and regional networks, where many users sit behind the same connection. It increases the likelihood of false positives. It amplifies the scale of impact when the system gets it wrong. And in regional Australia, where networks are already shared more heavily, and digital infrastructure is patchier than the cities like to remember, that scale can catch a lot of innocent people in one very quiet sweep.

This is not the regulator's design. This is Snapchat's chosen method of enforcement. They picked the blunt instrument. They own the bruises.

I have passed what I observed on to eSafety simply so the regulator has visibility of what is actually happening on the ground in regional New South Wales while these systems are being stress-tested in real time. They cannot see what they are not shown, and the young people sitting in front of me yesterday deserve to have the regulator know what is being done in compliance's name.

Australia has taken a strong and necessary position by placing responsibility back onto platforms. Not banning children from social media, but banning social media from accessing children. I believe in that distinction. I have argued for that distinction publicly, and I will continue to. The Commissioner and her office are enforcing it exactly as they should.

But responsibility for platforms does not end at blocking. 

It extends to getting it right. To build appeal processes that actually work when a teenager opens them in the morning before school. To use methods precise enough to catch the right users without dragging the wrong ones into the net alongside them. The rules require both halves. Snapchat does not get to deliver one and skip the other.

I have no doubt that some media outlets and even some cyber safety educators will seize on yesterday as proof the whole framework has failed, when what it actually proves is that the framework is finally biting hard enough to force movement, and watching people who claim to care about child online safety reach for the easy headline instead of doing the harder work of explaining the nuance to parents is, frankly, exhausting.

Thanks to the students who walked me through what they were seeing yesterday. You were the heads up that I can now leverage to help thousands of others.