Australia says the world will follow social media ban as Meta starts blocking teens

By Byron Kaye and James Redmayne

SYDNEY, Dec 4 (Reuters) – Australia’s internet regulator said a teen social media ban would be the first domino to fall in a global push to rein in Big Tech, as Meta’s Instagram, Facebook and Threads began locking out hundreds of thousands of accounts ahead of a deadline next week.

eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said she had initially expressed concern about the “blunt-force” approach of blocking under-16s from social media but she had come to embrace it after incremental regulatory changes were not effective enough.

“We’ve reached a tipping point,” Inman Grant said on Thursday at the Sydney Dialogue, a cyber summit.

“Our data is the currency that fuels these companies, and there are these powerful, harmful, deceptive design features that even a