Meta says it has removed 756,000 Australian teen accounts, but most under-16s are still online

Meta has deactivated 756,000 Australian accounts it believes belonged to under-16s, a figure it disclosed as the country’s world-first social media ban moves from threat to enforcement.

The company says 462,000 of those accounts were on Instagram and 294,000 on Facebook, all removed between December 2025 and June 2026.

It is a big, headline-friendly number, and Meta clearly wants it read as proof of good faith. The trouble is that a large removal count says very little about whether the policy is actually keeping teenagers off the platforms, which is rather the point of the whole exercise.

A company can remove a great many accounts and still be losing the wider argument, especially when the accounts keep coming back.

The ban itself took effect on 10 December 2025, when Australia became the first country to bar under-16s from mainstream social media outright.