In December 2025, Australia became the first country in the world to ban anyone under 16 from accessing a particular set of social media platforms, including Snapchat. 

The Social Media Minimum Age law excluded messaging platforms, and because we’re primarily used as a communications platform, we don’t believe Snapchat should be subject to such bans.  We have complied with the law nonetheless by locking or disabling more than 450,000 Australian Snapchat accounts.  We continue to monitor for additional removals daily and work with the Australian eSafety Commissioner to meet the requirements prescribed by this law. 

The question now is, will this ban make Australian teens safer or improve their wellbeing in practice?

While we share the same goal as parents and policymakers around the world — to keep teens safe online — we want to make sure the actions we are taking as a company and the choices that governments make to protect young people are having their intended effect. 

To learn more about how Australia’s ban is impacting the lives of teens and parents to this point, we commissioned YouGov to survey 500 Australian parents of teens (ages 13-17), roughly ten weeks after the restrictions took effect. Here's what the research found:

• The biggest concern among parents is that their teens are migrating to less safe spaces. More than 4-in-5 parents worry about their teens moving to platforms that are harder to monitor. 20% say this migration has already happened, and among those parents, 60% are concerned the new platforms may pose even greater risks. Fewer than half (47%) of those parents believe those new platforms have adequate parental controls. The most common alternatives that parents say teens have turned to include WhatsApp (65%), Messenger (49%), Discord (34%), and Roblox (32%) — platforms that (for reasons we do not agree with) are not covered by the ban.

• Parents question whether the ban is targeting the right platforms. 77% of parents are aware that the restrictions apply to some platforms but not others. Among that group, 42% view restricted and unrestricted platforms as equally harmful to teens, and another 9% believe the unrestricted platforms may actually be more harmful.

• Parents support restrictions in principle, but have doubts they're working in practice. 73% of Australian parents support the under-16 restrictions, but only 11% say the policy is “definitely’ achieving its intended goals, and just 13% are very confident the restrictions can actually be enforced. More than half express little to no confidence in enforcement.

• Parents aren’t confident in the law’s efficacy and see gaps in implementation. 70% believe the restrictions are easy to get around, and nearly 4-in-5 worry it gives parents a false sense of security that their kids are safer online than they actually are. These aren't just abstract concerns: 62% noticed at least one concrete issue with how the restrictions are working, including 22% who say their teen has already found ways to access restricted platforms. And it’s not just parents raising these concerns – 32% of concerned parents say their teen has discussed these issues with them too. 

These findings as a whole reinforce a key point: blanket bans risk functioning as band-aid solutions, creating a false sense of security for parents, while their teens turn to other platforms in search of the communities and memories they lost from the imposition of these restrictions. The path to keeping young people safe online requires thoughtful, evidence-based approaches and should support parents in helping maintain their teens’ wellbeing, rather than creating potential unintended challenges. 

Snapchat remains committed to working with governments, parents, and safety experts around the world to develop policies and platform-level safeguards that genuinely protect young people. As more countries consider online safety legislation, we hope these early findings encourage policymakers to look closely at the evidence and weigh the real-world consequences when deciding how best to protect teens online. 

Methodology

This research was commissioned by Snap and executed by YouGov. Interviews were conducted online from February 13 through February 19, 2026, among a nationwide sample of n=500 Australian Parents of Teens (ages 13-17). Results have a margin of error of plus or minus 4.5 percentage points at the 95% confidence level.