The Fort Worth Press - We Banned Social Media From Our Children, Not Our Children From Social Media

ALEXANDRIA, VA / ACCESS Newswire / October 28, 2026 / Following CBS's 60 Minutes investigation into Australia's under-16 social media restrictions, Safe on Social founder Kirra Pendergast is calling attention to a distinction she believes has been overlooked: Australia's law places the responsibility for preventing underage accounts on social media companies, not children, parents or schools.

Pendergast, who served on the advisory board for Australia's Age Assurance Technology Trial, says the debate over whether teenagers can circumvent the restrictions risks obscuring the larger question of whether platforms are taking reasonable steps to comply.

The 60 Minutes story was strange, moving and powerful; however, thirteen minutes could not fully convey what this law actually is.

Australia did not ban children from social media. We banned social media from our children. There is no penalty for a fifteen-year-old who keeps an account, no fine for the parent who helped set it up and no expectation that teachers will police anyone's phone. The obligations, and potential penalties of up to A$109.2 million for serious non-compliance, sit with the platforms. For twenty years, the burden of keeping children safe online fell on exhausted parents, overstretched schools and children themselves. Australia became the first country to hand it back to the companies that built the products and profited from the attention of the young people using them.

The idea began in South Australia, where Premier Peter Malinauskas, the equivalent of a governor, set out to put a community standard around childhood online. He has always admitted that young people will find their way around it, and I completely share his central argument: companies that know what he eats for breakfast and where he runs each morning can certainly tell a thirteen-year-old from a sixteen-year-old.

Our trial tested exactly that. Independent assessors put dozens of age assurance technologies through their paces and found that age can be assured in ways that protect privacy and work in the real world. No single method is perfect, and the strongest results come from layering approaches with sensible fallbacks. The technology question was answered before the law took effect, which left a question of will. That is the part of the 60 Minutes story that should trouble every American watching.

Julie Inman Grant, the former Microsoft and Twitter executive who enforces the law as Australia's eSafety Commissioner, told the program she has not seen the compliance she hoped for. Her disappointment makes sense when you watch what the same industry manages once age assurance suits its own interests.

Earlier this month Pornhub returned to Australia for iPhone users whose age Apple had already confirmed, because its owner decided those checks were good enough to bring a paying audience back. Roblox offers the other half of the lesson: verified child accounts began appearing for sale on eBay, and Roblox has since introduced continuous age checks.

Both stories show that the capability exists and can be switched on quickly when a company decides it should be. They also expose a blind spot in almost every system being built today: they work hard to stop children passing as adults and do very little to stop adults passing as children.

That blind spot is what reached my friend Wayne Holdsworth's son, Mac. In 2022, Mac was deceived by a man in his forties posing as another teenager, coerced into sharing an intimate image, threatened and then exposed to his friends and family when the extortion failed. He died by suicide the following year.

American parents will recognise the pattern. The FBI has spent years warning about financially motivated sextortion aimed largely at teenage boys and run by organised networks overseas. Wayne has since carried Mac's story into more than a hundred Australian schools, speaking for every parent who was told for years that this was their problem to solve alone.

In the first three months, the number of ten- to fifteen-year-olds holding at least one account on a restricted platform fell by around a fifth, real progress for a world first. Yet half of the under-sixteens who kept their accounts said they had never once been asked to confirm their age.

When Noah Jones showed the cameras how he kept one account through a face scan and others by typing in a different birth year, he exposed a failure of corporate effort rather than of the technology. He also makes a compelling case when he calls social media the modern town square, an argument familiar to anyone following First Amendment challenges to state age-verification laws.

The Youth Digital Index found that more than half of Australian children under thirteen have a social media account, rising to seventy percent of thirteen- to sixteen-year-olds, most set up with a parent's help. A law can shift the default but cannot win the conversation at the kitchen table on its own. Children who slip through on false birthdays end up on adult accounts without teen protections, so education at home and in classrooms must keep the door to help wide open.

The companies told 60 Minutes what they tell regulators everywhere, with Meta warning that blanket bans push teenagers into unregulated corners of the internet, Snap denying its product is built to hook children and TikTok describing safety at its core.

Americans are well placed to weigh those words. Earlier this year a jury here found Meta and YouTube liable for designing products that drove harmful and addictive use among young people, a verdict both are appealing, and state attorneys general are pressing similar cases across the country.

As the United Kingdom, Norway, Spain, Canada, American states and Congress all write their own versions, the most important choice is where to place the duty. A law that asks children to prove their innocence, parents to sign forms or schools to confiscate phones will repeat the mistake of the last twenty years under a new name.

A law that places the obligation squarely on the companies, backed by penalties large enough to change their priorities, safety by design standards, the right to switch off algorithmic feeds and a firm commitment to collecting as little data about children as possible, puts responsibility where the power has always been.

Australia has not finished this work, but we have changed the narrative globally from what families should do about the platforms to what the platforms owe to families.

The measure of success I hope we use on both sides of the Pacific is not simply how many accounts are closed. It is whether a child in trouble tonight feels safe enough to tell someone, without fearing that speaking up will get them into trouble for being on a platform they are not yet old enough to use.

It is also whether the company that let a stranger reach that child is finally the one held to account.

Kirra Pendergast is available for interviews and expert commentary on Australia's social media age restrictions, age assurance technology, platform accountability and the lessons for American policymakers, schools and families.

About Safe on Social Inc.

Safe on Social, powered by Ctrl+Shft, has worked at the frontline of digital safety since 2013, building more than a decade of Earned Intelligence™ from the real-world experiences of schools, educators, families and communities.

Founded by bestselling author and digital safety expert Kirra Pendergast, that frontline knowledge now powers Ctrl+Shft, a Behavioral Risk Intelligence platform designed to identify emerging patterns of digital and behavioral risk earlier, document duty of care and help organizations act before concerning signals become serious harm.

Through its US entity, Safe on Social Inc. works with public and private schools to bring together education, risk intelligence and governance through one connected system, helping make technology a safer and more positive part of school life.

Learn more at www.safeonsocial.com.

Learn more about Kirra Pendergast at www.kirrapendergast.com.

Media, Partnership & Investor Inquiries

Will Anstee
Safe on Social Inc.
[email protected]
www.safeonsocial.com

SOURCE: Safe on Social Inc.

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S.Rocha--TFWP