In December 2025, Australia became the first country in the world to prohibit access to social networks for those under 16 years of age, a proposal that Pedro Sánchez would second last February. The objective of that measure, in the words of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, was to protect children and adolescents from digital environments that had become “a weapon for bullies, a source of anxiety, a vehicle for scammers and, even worse, a means for child abuse”; and for this, a dry law was chosen as a remedy.
With the entry into force of the law, hundreds of thousands of teenagers woke up one morning without access to the platforms. “Following Australian legislation, you will not be able to use social networks until you turn 16,” warned the last pop-up notification they would receive from Instagram. If they break with the new norm, large technology companies would have to pay 30 million US dollars to the Australian State, reducing their profits.
However, in the antipodes of the globe, that short summer of autarky melted like an ice cream cone, staining with drips the text of a law that was beautiful, but did not work. Despite the ban, just four months later almost two-thirds of Australian minors aged between 12 and 15 say they have regained access to their networks through the back door, lying about their date of birth or ignoring requests for age verification. Nor would the independent body in charge of evaluating its impact, eSafety, find a significant drop in levels of bullying or sexual harassment based on deepfakes or intimate images.
Not even France, which in July became the first country in the European Union to ban networks for those under 15 years of age, seems to have taken note. The European Commission, on the other hand, is already pointing in another direction, demanding, along with the age restriction, “safety by design” systems. That is the path that Spain should take. Conditioning the ban on the harmful or addictive elements of the platform design, and not on the age of the user, is the real lesson in the failure of the Australian model, focused on bans based on age. Arguing where the gates to the field are placed makes no sense. If the goal is to “turn social media into a healthy and democratic space,” boarding up the windows isn't going to make that space less moldy, and adding latches doesn't keep the violent people out.
The problems linked to the use of social networks suffered by children and adolescents in our country are linked to a very specific business model: capturing our attention and exploiting our data through design elements that are unsafe, harmful or addictive. Unsafe, such as a child under 12 years of age being able to receive non-consensual private messages from unknown adults. Harmful, such as advertising based on personal data that causes a 14-year-old girl with a predisposition to anorexia to be bombarded with advertisements for miracle diets. And addictive, like infinite scrolling, which makes us spend hours in front of the screen to consume more content.
A fake account factory in Myanmar or the Philippines may be interested in being able to send messages to unknown accounts, as they are a central piece of the modus operandi of cyber scammers. But why would a father or mother be in favor of allowing, by default, their children's account to receive messages from any stranger knowing the risk it poses? Published opinion studies show that they are not. Simply put, in the digital Wild West the owners of the saloon, gun shop and casino have ruled so far.
For digital protection for minors and adolescents to move in this direction would avoid repeating the errors of a model doomed to failure and regulatory chaos. But, above all, it would be right to focus on a business model, that of platforms, that we would not have allowed to any other industry, even less so if the first affected were the smallest.
Making managers criminally responsible for their companies' infractions would also move in this direction: fines, for an enterprise as lucrative as data mining and the exploitation of our privacy, are simply not enough. If allowing the dissemination of content that is both harmful and profitable can be compensated by a fine, fines run the risk of becoming a papal bull.
