Eight months into the world’s first under-16 social media ban, 26% of Australian children aged 13 to 15 are still using TikTok, one percentage point below where the figure sat before the law took effect.
The data comes from the parental control software maker Qustodio, and it puts numbers to something already visible in the enforcement record, which is that the ban has not been complied with in the way the legislation assumed.
The shape of the recovery is what makes the data interesting. Usage fell sharply when the law came into force and then climbed steadily back, which is the pattern of a barrier being worked around rather than a behaviour being changed.
“What we’ve seen is an immediate drop to a degree, but slowly but surely the numbers have started to increase again,” said Yasmin London, Qustodio’s global online safety expert. Instagram and Snapchat sit below TikTok in the figures but follow the same curve.
The most awkward finding concerns the youngest group. TikTok use among children aged 10 to 12 is now higher than it was before the ban, a cohort the law was most clearly designed to protect and one that was never supposed to be on the platform in the first place.
