How to Talk to Your Friends After the U-16 Facebook and Instagram Ban
Don’t panic, there’s no need to evade the ban. Nearly everything you want to do remains legal.
What Apps are Banned?
“From 10 December 2025, Facebook, Instagram, Kick, Reddit, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, Twitch, X and YouTube will be required to take reasonable steps to prevent Australians under 16 from having accounts on their platforms.” - ESafety Commissioner
Source: Social media 'ban' or delay FAQs
According to Meta, they’ll start banning accounts on Facebook and Instagram on 4 December 2025.
Social Media Isn’t Necessary For Communication
You might be worried that losing social media will mean that you lose the ability to socialize online. That’s not true at all.
It might be the case that you have only ever talked to your friends through Instagram, but there are other ways! At the time of writing (21/11/25) Messenger and Discord are exempt from the age restrictions.
If you already have an account with Meta (Facebook or Instagram), you’ll find it very easy to set up a Messenger account. Messenger has convenient “Chat Heads” which allow you to minimize conversations while using other apps and reopen them easily. There’s also a webpage version.
Messenger allows texts, audio and video calls to all numbers of participants. It even has disappearing and encrypted message options, great if that was a feature of Snapchat that you liked.
If you like having large amounts of people in the same conversation, Discord could be for you. If you have a year-level Facebook group for your school, consider setting up a discord server to replace it.
Discord servers can also be used in a similar way to Facebook event pages. And if you like online gaming, Discord servers are great for organizing your party and getting everyone on voice chat together.
Many social media personalities also run or are affiliated with their own discord servers. You can join these to keep in touch with online communities that are important to you, but remember ‘stranger danger’ when talking to users you don’t know in real life, including influencers.
Using Youtube and Reddit Without an Account
You don’t have to miss out on your favourite YouTube videos or subreddits, you just have to navigate to them manually. This ban is all about stopping kids from being exposed to harmful content by personalised algorithms. You can still access all Youtube videos by searching for a specific channel and if you want to scroll the latest posts in r/cats, you can! If you’re worried about forgetting about a creator or topic you’d like to check on, write a list of your favorite internet places while you still have your account to reference. Consider it your menu!
Don’t Forget About Texts, Emails and Phone Calls
You could say goodbye to all of this stuff and go back to how we did it in 2010. If your friends have phones, they have phone numbers! Almost no-one has a mobile phone plan with less than unlimited calls and texts in 2025. Check yours, then go nuts! Stick a bunch of your friends in an email together and use reply-all to make it a group-chat! If you’re willing to use a less aesthetic app, email, text and phone calls can facilitate any communication you want to do.
Try to See the Positives
I know TikTok is really fun and I haven’t provided an alternative here, but don’t rush to circumnavigate the ban. You now have an opportunity to escape the app! TikTok is so insidiously entertaining that I have banned myself from it for years. I can’t use it in a healthy way. Every time I’ve had it installed on my phone it has chained me to couch for days.
Think about your New Years resolutions, I’m sure that “keep using TikTok” isn’t one of them. Maybe you want to read more books, train more for your sport, or practice more with your instrument. TikTok is eating into these goals by using up your time and energy in a whirlwind of engagement-bait!
You, the young people of Australia, should use this opportunity to create a new normal where you spend your time reading, playing together and meeting up in-person. If you do this, you will flourish in a way that the generation above you, who have suffered greatly from social media exposure, can only dream of.