Fears ‘horse has already bolted’ as most Australian children are already online

Research from Australia’s eSafety Commission has found 1.3 million children under the age of 13 are active on social media, despite age restrictions.

More than 1.3 million Australian children under the age of 13 are already active on social media despite existing age restrictions, the nation’s eSafety Commissioner will reveal today, raising fears the “horse has already bolted” on kids’ online safety.

New research undertaken by the eSafety office has found 84 per cent of children aged 8 to 12-years-old report using at least one online service since the start of the year.

Three in four had already accessed a social media or messaging platform by the time they turned 8, while almost 100 per cent of 12-year-olds had done so – despite being under the current official age limit for social media sites.

“Considering Australia’s population of roughly 1.6 million 8-12-year-olds, this suggests that approximately 1.34 million have used an online service since the beginning of 2024,” eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant will tell attendees at Sydney’s social media summit.

Her office surveyed kids’ use of BeReal, Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, Reddit, Snapchat, Steam, Threads, TikTok, Twitch, X, YouTube, Discord, Signal, Pinterest, WhatsApp and Telegram, all of which require users to be at least 13 years old to sign up, or in the case of Telegram 16-plus.

Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

However, 40 per cent of children said they had their own accounts, bypassing existing age ‘verification’. On most platforms this simply requires users to input their birthdate, without needing to cite any evidence, or tick a box stating they are 13 or over.

More than half of those surveyed had used a parent or carer’s account, while six per cent had used a sibling or friends’ account.

Australia’s online safety watchdog raised the alarm bells over websites using artificial intelligence to create sex bots that mimic humans.

Australian authorities currently have no remit to enforce the age restrictions set out in each platforms’ terms of service, however legislation to be introduced by the Albanese government this year would explicitly ban underage users.

The Prime Minister has indicated support for an age limit of 16 years old, in line with News Corp’s Let Them Be Kids campaign. A $6.5m trial of “age assurance technology” to enforce the new laws – such as biometric age estimation, email verification and account confirmation processes – will begin later this month.

The eSafety office, meanwhile, has discovered only 13 per cent of the 8-12 year olds with social media accounts they surveyed had been suspended or banned from the platform, a fact Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said was “astounding”.

In her speech to the NSW and South Australian governments’ Social Media Summit this afternoon, Ms Inman Grant will describe her office’s findings as “concerning” and call on both lawmakers and industry leaders to pay attention to the risks.

Millions of Australian children are using social media. Picture: Denis Charlet / AFP

“The evolving threat landscape for children is not one that we can or should ignore,” she will say.

“We are already seeing “nudifying apps’ and powerful deepfakes being weaponised against young girls.

“It’s clear the technology industry needs to do so much more, not least to enforce their own rules, but for many parents, the horse has already bolted.

“Helping them navigate this tricky territory is probably the single most important thing we can do.”