The biggest social media companies in the world – the likes of Meta, YouTube and Snapchat – have started kicking hundreds of thousands of teenagers off their platforms after the Australian government increased the age to hold an account from 13 to 16.

Short-form video giant TikTok is the latest, revealing on Friday it would use technology to estimate someone’s age from their face and, if that did not work, allow them to use a credit card or share some form of government identification. TikTok said it had about 200,000 Australian users aged between 13 and 15 years old.