In December 2025, Australia became the first country in the world to bar anyone under 16 from holding a social media account. Within a day, its own prime minister was dealing with the predictable result. Teenagers flooded the comment section on Anthony Albanese’s TikTok account, including one that read, “I’m still here, wait until I can vote.” A 14-year-old, in New South Wales, had already told the Washington Post weeks earlier that she planned to log back into Snapchat and Instagram using her mother’s Face ID. On Reddit, teenagers traded tips on beating facial age checks, including printing a mesh face mask bought from Temu. The free VPN app Windscribe reported a 400 percent jump in Australian downloads in the first 24 hours after the law took effect. Leonardo Puglisi, the teenage founder of the youth outlet 6 News Australia, said his platform barely felt the impact at all.
Six months on, the research backs up what those stories suggested. A working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, co-authored by behavioural economist Angela Duckworth and legal scholar Cass Sunstein, surveyed 835 Australian teenagers four months after the ban began and found that only about one in four 14 and 15-year-olds were actually complying. The same researchers found something more telling underneath that number: the teenagers who do comply see themselves as less popular than the ones who don’t, so the more socially influential kids are disproportionately the ones still on the platforms. Teenagers told the researchers they would need roughly two-thirds of their peers off social media before they would consider stopping themselves. Separately, the Molly Rose Foundation, a UK youth safety charity, polled 1,050 Australian 12 to 15-year-olds and found that 61 percent who had accounts before the ban still had access to at least one platform months later, mostly because the platforms had simply not removed them. Snap’s own chief executive, Evan Spiegel, wrote in the Financial Times that Australia’s age-estimation technology was frequently wrong by two to three years, and warned that teenagers pushed off regulated platforms were more likely to land on apps with fewer safety protections, not to log off altogether.
This is the policy Kenya is now being asked to import. A petition currently before Parliament, filed by Erickson Odhiambo, calls for a Child Online Protection and Digital Responsibility Act. It would set 16 as the minimum age for a child to open a social media account independently, introduce mandatory age verification, require parental consent, and create a National Child Online Safety Commission. It leans on Article 53 of the Constitution and the Children Act 2022, and it lands squarely in the wake of the United Kingdom’s own announcement of an under-16 ban, which Keir Starmer has said will follow Australia’s model.
It is worth sitting with that lineage for a moment. Kenya’s petition was not built from research into how Kenyan children actually use the internet. It travelled from Australia to the UK to a parliamentary petition in Nairobi, picking up citations along the way rather than data. That is the part that troubles me most. We are not short of our own evidence.
Only 38% of Africa’s population was online in 2024, according to the International Telecommunication Union’s State of Digital Development in Africa report, against a global average of 68 percent. It is the lowest connectivity rate of any region on the planet. The gap between Africa’s cities and its villages is also the widest in the world: 57% of urban Africans use the internet against 23% in rural areas, and 14% of the continent’s population, rising to a quarter in rural areas, has no mobile broadband signal to connect to at all. GSMA’s 2026 Mobile Economy report puts Africa’s “usage gap” at 63%, meaning that most people who do live under mobile broadband coverage still are not using the internet. The World Bank and the Brookings Institution have found that sub-Saharan Africa’s digital skills adoption sits at roughly half the global average, and that twelve of the twenty countries with the weakest digital skills worldwide are on this continent.
Kenya sits inside that picture, not above it. National internet penetration stood at 40.5 % at the end of 2025, according to DataReportal. A joint survey by the Communications Authority of Kenya and the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics found that only 11.6% of Kenyans aged three and above use a computer, rising to just over 20 percent in urban areas.
For children specifically, the picture is more complicated than online or not online. Disrupting Harm in Kenya, a study by UNICEF, ECPAT and INTERPOL, found that 67% of Kenyan children aged 12 to 17 are internet users. But only 27% of those internet-using children go online every single day. Most are getting onto the internet now and then, on someone else’s phone, a school computer, a cyber café, or a relative’s data bundles, not through a device and connection they control themselves. A petition imagining Kenyan children “independently” opening social media accounts is describing a pattern of use that does not match how most Kenyan children reach the internet in the first place.
It is tempting for Africa to copy the Global North when it comes to digital policy. But we have to ask what our own realities are first. The Global North is regulating from a place of saturation. Its children have had access for years, and its present problem is overexposure. Ours is different. Many African children are still excluded. They lack access, skills, connectivity, devices and safe digital spaces. Yet within less than two decades, Africa’s young population is projected to be central to driving the global economy. It is hard to see how that generation leads anything if it is locked out of the very spaces where knowledge, innovation, creativity and economic power are increasingly built.
Banning may feel like protection, but it risks deepening inequality and setting Africa further behind. Our responsibility is not to copy fear-based policies built for a different population’s problems. Our responsibility is to build digital spaces that are safe, African and designed around children, places where they can learn, create, participate and thrive.
There is also a real difference between banning children from the internet altogether and restricting their access to social media accounts specifically. Kenya’s petition is the latter, closer to the UK’s model than to a blanket ban, and that distinction deserves to be kept clear rather than flattened in the debate.
But even granting that distinction, I am far from convinced an age restriction will work as intended either. Age verification is easy to get around, and children know it. A University of Sydney study on the rollout found that 86% of young people and 83% of their parents agreed teenagers would find workarounds, even as a similar share of those same parents supported the idea of age limits in principle. What the paper captures so well is that this is a social problem. A rule that costs you socially to follow collapses once enough of your friends ignore it, no matter what the law says on paper. Starmer compared the ban to underage drinking, arguing that teenagers occasionally buying alcohol does not mean governments should scrap the drinking age. The comparison does not quite hold. A bottle shop has one checkpoint: the till. A social media account has none, and a 15-year-old with a parent’s old phone, a borrowed photo, or a five-minute VPN download can be back online before the policy debate has even settled.
None of this means Kenya should do nothing. It means the tool has to fit the actual problem, and the actual country. If Parliament wants to act on Article 53 and the Children Act, the more useful question is not what age a child should be allowed to open an account. It is why so few Kenyan children have a personal device or a reliable connection in the first place, why platforms operating here face almost no local accountability for how their algorithms treat young users, and what it would take to put digital literacy into a curriculum that reaches children well beyond Nairobi’s better-resourced schools. Those are harder problems to legislate than an age limit. They are also the ones actually worth solving.