Australian teens were kicked off social media this week. Some are back already

Fourteen-year-old cheerleader Lucy Brooks briefly lost some friends on Snapchat when Australia’s ban on social media came into effect on Wednesday.

But within 24 hours, they were back. Many had made new accounts, with some borrowing the faces of parents and older friends who were happy to help them evade age detection technology.

When Australia imposed its world-leading ban on social media for under-16s, critics predicted other platforms would quickly replace the 10 banned sites that include teen favorites Snapchat, TikTok and Instagram.

But perhaps they didn’t anticipate how easy it would be for teenagers to pop back up again on the same platforms, using the same kind of tricks that teens in the United Kingdom used when their government introduced its Online Safety Act in July.

“A lot of the time it was with the parents’ knowledge, but people are also using AI-generated pictures of people and videos, like getting AI to make a 40-year-old person … to get past it as well,” said Lucy, who lost access to Instagram but is still on Snapchat and TikTok.