Don't argue with the platform profiting from kids — get the state to ban them instead

the problem

Australian platforms let under-16s dodge a 13-plus rule they never enforced, because underage accounts are their growth

background

what everyone would do

The obvious move is to pressure the platforms to enforce their stated 13-plus age limit — public shaming, shareholder activism, appeals to 'corporate responsibility.' It fails because enforcement costs the platform the exact users it is trying to acquire: an under-16 ban is a revenue cut the platform pays for, so every incentive runs the opposite direction and the policy talk never turns into action.

what they saw

The blocker was misaligned incentives — a platform would never enforce an age floor that slashed its growth. So they stopped asking the conflicted party and made the government make compliance a legal obligation.

the move

Production-company founder Rob Galluzzo and radio host Michael 'Wippa' Wipfli built the movement '36 Months' around the three-year gap between 13 and 16. Instead of petitioning the platforms, they put grieving parents of teens who died (with deaths attributed to social media) before the media and before politicians, ran a change.org petition past 125,000 signatures, and lobbied Canberra directly — reframing the age question so that the government, the one party with no conflict of interest, had more to lose by doing nothing than by acting.

why it works

Once the fight moved to parliament, the economics flipped. Lobbying the platforms meant asking a company to forgo revenue — a request it had every reason to refuse. Lobbying the government meant raising the political cost of an issue voters and grieving families were loudly tied to, while the cost of acting (a law the platforms would have to obey) fell on the platforms, not on the politicians. The petition and the families supplied the political heat; the resulting statute transferred the enforcement burden, with fines, to the very companies whose incentive structure had made the problem. Because the compliance cost landed on the platforms rather than the campaigners, the campaign got the outcome without needing the offender's consent.

the payoff

Australia became the first state to legislate a 16-minimum social media age (Act 127/2024): platforms must bar under-16s or face fines.

where it breaks

It fails when the neutral enforcer has its own reason to stay out — if the issue is fringe (no grieving faces to give it gravity), if the regulator is captured, or if the offending behavior is legal and popular enough that politicians gain nothing by opposing it. It also depends on a willing state: in regimes without press freedom or representative pressure, 'make them legislate' is not a lever. And being political cuts both ways: independent reporting (Crikey) later exposed that the movement was partly funded and co-staffed by a firm earning from gambling ads, so claims of purity attract scrutiny and can blunt the very credibility the campaign runs on.

what came after

The law took effect and put the enforcement burden on platforms under penalty, and the campaign's mechanism spread internationally: its founders addressed the UN, and the EU and others took up matching under-16 minimum-age pushes, normalizing 'raise the statutory age floor' as the way to constrain platforms that would never self-regulate.

references

1. [1]36 Months: The World-Leading Campaign That Changed Social Media Laws For TeenagersB&T (bandt.com.au), 2025bandt.com.au
2. [2]Unpacking the campaign that changed Australia's social media laws: 36 Months podcast launchesCampaign Brief, 2025campaignbrief.com
3. [3]Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024 (No. 127, 2024)Federal Register of Legislation (Australian Government), 2024legislation.gov.au

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