Oliver Conway

14-year-old Sophia from Brisbane was one of the first to get locked out.

Australia's Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says the ban gives youngsters a chance to spend time doing other things.

Start a new sport, learn a new instrument or read that book that has been sitting there on your shelf for some time.

And importantly, spend quality time with your friends and your family, face to face.

So how does it all work?

I heard from our technology correspondent Chris Vallance.

From the point of view of the government, this is a delay rather than a ban.

Most of these platforms that fall under this require their users to have a minimum age of 13.

Now this goes up under this law to 16.

So essentially what this applies to is a list of 10 platforms at the moment.

Those are eight of the usual suspects, if you like, meta apps.

YouTube, Threads, Reddit, X, and so on, and two streaming platforms, Kik and Twitch.

And essentially, they have to take reasonable steps to check that their users aren't under 16.

And if they don't do that, there's the prospect of big fines.

50 million Australian dollars, that's around 33 million US dollars.

Although some critics have said for these companies, which make billions of dollars in revenue every year, that's a bit of a parking fine.

For the younger teenagers who've used these apps to talk to each other, are there other ways they can still keep in touch?

Well, again, this is an interesting facet of what's proposed that has certainly attracted a fair bit of criticism and scrutiny because there are no restrictions other than the usual terms of service on using messaging platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger.

There aren't restrictions on gaming platforms like Roblox and on services like Discord.

So there are certainly ways in which they can continue to keep in touch.