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The Tech Impact and Policy Center's Social Media Lab (SML) serves as the Lead Academic Partner on the Australian eSafety Commissioner's two-year evaluation of the policy, working alongside an independent Academic Advisory Group to help design the study, advise on analysis, and peer-review the findings. The Commissioner's first follow-up report, Early days, early insights, is now out, drawing on a nationally representative baseline survey of over 4,000 families collected before the law took effect, and a three-month follow-up with roughly 1,000 of those same families.

If there's one number worth remembering from this report and it's not about kids, it's about platforms. Among children who still held an account on an age-restricted platform three months in, half (50.2%) said the reason was simple: the platform had never asked them to verify their age. Not a workaround. Not a VPN. Not a clever teenager outsmarting the system, just no prompt at all.

That single stat reframes the debate. The law targets platforms, not children or parents, and there are no penalties for under-16s who keep an account. So when the report also finds that overall account ownership on age-restricted platforms dropped from 52.4% at baseline to 42.1% at three months, the honest read is: real, but partial. Many children who had accounts before the law simply kept them.

A second finding deserves more attention than it's gotten: parental awareness of their child's social media use actually declined after the restrictions took effect. At baseline, 23.3% of parents didn't know their child had used social media in the past four weeks; by three months, that had risen to 33.3%, with the shift concentrated among parents of girls and children aged 10–12. This is the kind of unintended consequence a longitudinal evaluation is designed to catch early, and it's worth asking why: are kids disclosing less, are parents checking in less, or both?

Third, there are early signs of redistribution rather than disengagement. Children's daily-or-more use of messaging platforms rose from 40.5% to 52.3%, alongside increases in online gaming and use of a handful of platforms not currently classified as age-restricted, including Pinterest and BeReal. Kids aren't necessarily logging off, some appear to be moving elsewhere.

What this report gives us, ultimately, is a first look at how children and parents are experiencing these restrictions just three months in. Its value isn't in telling us whether the policy has worked; it's too early for that. Instead, it lets us start checking whether the early changes the policy anticipated are actually beginning to show up, and whether the foundations for real, longer-term outcomes are being laid. 

SML will continue as Lead Academic Partner through the full two-year evaluation, with the next survey wave due at six months.