🌐 How to Build a Safe Online Community for Young People in Australia

01 What Is Australia's Under-16 Social Media Ban?

If you're only just catching up on this, here's what you need to know before anything else in this guide makes sense.

1. The law: The Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024 requires platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, Threads, X, Kick, and Twitch to take reasonable steps to prevent Australians under 16 from having and holding accounts.

2. When it started: The restrictions took effect on 10 December 2025. It's a world-first: no other country has implemented a blanket minimum age requirement across major platforms at this scale.

3. Why it's contested: Almost nobody disputes that young people face real risks online. What's contested is whether removing platform access is the right lever versus regulating how platforms are designed. NARU's own interviews with 19+ Australian youth-sector practitioners in 2026 found near-universal criticism that the law was designed without meaningful youth consultation, regardless of whether interviewees supported the ban's underlying goal.

4. What it doesn't cover: The law targets specific major platforms, it doesn't govern private community tools, closed messaging apps, school-run platforms, or purpose-built community spaces. That's the gap this guide is about: the law didn't tell organisations what to build instead, only what young people can no longer use.

5. It's still being evaluated: eSafety is running a multi-year impact evaluation with the Stanford Social Media Lab, with findings due progressively across 2027–2028. It is genuinely too early to know whether the law is achieving its stated mental health goals, we've tried to be direct about that throughout this guide rather than assuming an answer either way.

02 Why Removing a Platform Doesn't Remove the Need to Belong

Between July and September 2026, NARU conducted 20 semi-structured interviews with program managers, educators, advocates and thought leaders working across youth mental wellbeing and youth-facing organisations in Australia.

We wanted to understand what had changed for organisations and young people since Australia’s Social Media Minimum Age law took effect and, more importantly, what organisations need to consider when creating safer digital spaces for young people.

Our interviewees did not agree on everything. There were different views on whether the age restriction was necessary, whether it would work, and what its unintended consequences might be.

But across those different perspectives, a number of common themes emerged around what young people and the organisations supporting them need from digital spaces.

A career mentoring program officer at an Australian university sees both sides but characterised the ban as a weak substitute for a real solution.

“The ban [is] a 'lazy solution'.”

- Career mentoring program officer at an Australian university, 12 Aug 2026

A program facilitator at a youth organisation, asked:

“Where were the young people's voices in it? It was something that was done to them without consultation.”

- Program facilitator at a youth organisation, 15 Jul 2026

Their comments reflects a broader tension we heard throughout our conversations: removing access to a platform does not necessarily remove the need that brought young people there in the first place.

Young people still need connection, belonging, information, support and opportunities to participate. For youth organisations, the challenge is therefore not simply deciding whether young people should be online. It is creating digital environments where those needs can be met with appropriate safeguards.

eSafety is running a multi-year research with the Standford Social Media Lab, with results due across 2027 - 2028, meaning it’s sincerely too early to know if the law is meeting it’s own mental health goals.

So here’s what we have learnt so far:

1. The law solved a presence problem, not a design problem: It stops under-16s from having or accessing accounts on specific platforms, it does not make the spaces young people move to next any safer or better.

2. Practitioners on the ground felt the operational gap immediately: communication and interaction with students shifted overnight to schools, learning platforms, and word of mouth, feedback loops, mentor contact and peer to peer contact got harder to maintain once direct digital contact required going through an intermediary.

3. Young people didn’t stop needing what social media gave them: eSafety’s 2026 research found many young people ranked the benefits of online connection including self expression, belonging, mood regulation overrides the harms and most couldn’t name an equivalent offline substitute.

4. This is a design problem, not a discipline problem: NARU’s position, cited independently by Prevention United, is that most harm young people encounter online can be linked backed to how a space was built, and not the fact that they wanted to connect at all.

5. This guide is for anyone building for the next generation: Youth organisations, schools, community programs and policymakers are all asking similar questions right now: given the ban, how do we actually create a safe online community for young people? and this guide gives you the decision sequence to do so.

03 What Makes a Youth Community Different From Any Other Online Space

It’s quite tempting to treat this chapter as a “one-size-fits all community” playbook which includes choose a community platform tool, set some ground rules for young people, and move on.

But it isn’t, working with young people as an organisation is carrying a different level of responsibility than a gaming forum, or a customer community and that responsibility includes:

1. Safety: Who has access to the community? Who can contact whom? What happens when something goes wrong? Safety isn’t a feature, it’s the foundation everything else sits on.

2. Belonging: Do young people feel comfortable using the platform? Was the platform designed with young people in mind? Can young people participate and form connection or relationships in the platform or they are simply a member of the platform? A space with no incidents and no meaningful interaction hasn’t solved the problem it was made for.

3. Structure: Can your organisation run programs, events, resources, and peer accountability inside the space, or is it simply just a noticeboard packaged as a chat app relying on multiple disconnected tools for your community’s activities?

4. Oversight: Can your organisation understand what is happening inside the community, or are you passively relying on young people giving you feedback while assuming that everything is fine?

These four responsibilities translate into seven practical requirements for your youth community, which a hobby forum, a customer community, or a general server was never built to do:

1. Controlled access : You know who is inside and members are vouched before they can access your gated space.

2. Clear Moderation: There is a real mechanism for members and moderatos to flag and respond to harmful behaviour, not just a report button nobody uses

3. Safe communication: Private messaging and other forms of direct communication are designed to be safely governed, rather than becoming a blind spot you discover after something goes wrong.

4. Community Structure: The community platform and program is designed in such a way that young people have a clear reason to return, participate and contribute, rather than simply having another algorithm feed to scroll and watch content all day.

5. Belonging and peer connection: The space enables young people to interact and have peer-to-peer collaboration with one another, not only with staff or program organisers.

6. Organisational Oversight: Your team can understand meaningful participation, activity, interaction and transformation, with practical metrics such as member count, day to day engagement to understand where the community isn’t working.

7. Privacy by design: Now this one is the crux of the matter. The community platform needs to have encrypted data storage, an anti-algorithm design, no use of AI/ML in replacing human interaction, rather than depending entirely on an advertising-driven public network whose goals may not match yours

These seven requirements are connected: Controlled access affects safety, community structure affects participation, communication affects both connection and safeguarding and oversight affects whether problems are noticed and acted on.

The rest of this guide is created around getting all seven right and importantly getting them in the right order.

The next chapter turns these requirements into a practical framework for thinking about what a youth organisation should build, replace or change.

04 The Five Pillars: What a Safer Youth Community Requires

Nineteen youth sector practitioners interviewed by NARU had different things to say about the under-16 ban, but across those conversations, when asked what should happen next, they converged on the same five actions.

1. Replace

The law removed access without thinking about what comes next and young people don’t stop needing friendship, belonging, information, support or access to your program because their access to a platform changes, so if an existing channel disappears or becomes unaccessible, organisations need to consider what will replace the function it was serving.

The founder of an Australian digital platform for children's mental health captured this concern in our conversation:

“They needed to replace something before something can get taken away.”

- Founder of an Australian digital platform for children's mental health, 4 Aug 2026

For youth organisations, this means asking:

What need was the old platform meeting, and where will that need be met now?

The replacement doesn't have to replicate social media. It needs to provide the connection, communication, participation or support that young people actually need.

2. Educate

Safety isn’t created by restricting behaviour or giving some set of rules and regulations, young people and parents also need knowledge and skills on how to navigate digital environments, including communication, boundary-setting, critical thinking and recognising when something isn’t right.

A product marketer (ex-teacher and ex-social worker) at a digital mental health clinic and tele-therapy provider in the United States argued for conversation and education alongside restrictions, with a focus on helping young people develop the ability to self-regulate rather than relying entirely on external rules.

“It's easier to say… 'let's just ban it'… versus… doing the hard work of educating.”

- Product Marketer of a US-based digital mental health clinic, 19 Aug 2026

This aligns with research from the Young and Resilient Research Centre, in partnership with eSafety, which found that young people want practical skills and resources to help them navigate online safety.

For you, digital literacy shouldn’t be a one-time onboarding event, but should be built into your program.

3. Bound

A safer community needs boundaries, rules and regulations, which means you need to think carefully about who can join, who can contact whom, what members can see, and what happens when someone crosses a boundary.

The founder of an Australian digital platform for children's mental health and also a family counsellor advocated for closed, moderated spaces where you can control membership over open platforms.

“Some form of connection for children… make it safe for kids to be able to have that communication but filtering it with the bullying.”

- Founder of an Australian digital platform for children's mental health, 4 Aug 2026

The point isn’t that one particular platform is automatically safe, it’s that you and your team should have enough control over the environment to establish appropriate boundaries for your particular community.

4. Hold platforms accountable

Youth organisations shouldn’t have to take a platform’s safety claims at face value, safety features need to work in practice, not just appear on a product page.

Independent testing by Fairplay(2025) has found gaps between some platforms' stated safety features and their real-world performance.

The youth futures coordinator at a philanthropic grants organisation to support remote, rural, and regional communities across Australia also argued that platforms themselves should carry greater responsibility for building safeguards into their products.

“The onus absolutely should be on the platforms themselves to build in more safeguards.”

- Youth futures coordinator at philanthropic grants organisation, 31 Aug 2026

In an interview with NARU, Prevention United drew a direct parallel between safety-by-design and product-safety regulation on other industries, a direction echoed internationally by the UN's 2026 "Getting Children's Safety Online Right" framework, which similarly argues that restricting access "cannot stand as the endpoint" without safer platform design underneath it.

For organisations choosing a platform, this means asking:

• What safety controls actually exist?

• Are they enabled by default?

• Who controls them?

• Can they be independently verified?

• What happens when a safety feature fails?

• How quickly does the platform respond to serious reports?

Safety should be a product responsibility, not something youth organisations have to build around an unsafe product.

5. Co-design

Young people should have a meaningful roles in shaping the spaces they will be spending time interacting with friends, peers and staff, that doesn’t mean asking young people for feedback and putting their comments in a report.

It means creating mechanisms for young people to influence decisions, test ideas and features, identify problems and see what changed as a result.

Brigid, former CEO of YLab, highlighted three conditions for meaningful youth participation in our conversation: young people should be paid for their time, their involvement should draw on real skills, and they should be able to see what came from their contribution.

For a youth organisation, co-design can mean establishing a youth advisory group, involving young people in platform testing, reviewing community rules with them, or giving them a defined role in ongoing governance.

The five pillars work together

These aren't five separate boxes to tick.

1. Replace addresses the need created when an existing channel disappears.

2. Educate gives young people the skills to navigate digital environments.

3. Bound establishes the limits and controls around participation.

4. Hold platforms accountable makes sure the technology itself carries part of the safety burden.

5. Co-design keeps young people involved in deciding whether the system actually works for them.

Together, they provide a starting point for building digital communities that are not simply less risky, but genuinely designed around safety, connection and participation.

Hear the conversations behind this guide

This guide draws on conversations with people working across the youth sector. If you want to hear directly from some of those perspectives, listen to Raising Youth Voices, NARU's podcast exploring youth connection, belonging and safety in a changing digital environment.

Listen to Raising Youth Voices: Beyond the Ban →

05 The Build Sequence: What to Decide First

Most guides on choosing a safe community platform for organisations gives a list of things to think about, but the issue is that these decisions don’t exist in isolation.

The platform you choose affects your access, your governance model, moderation and also how you respond to crisis or conflicts.

Based on our research and conversations with youth-sector practitioners, we’ve found it more useful to think about these decisions in steps:

From Platform & access → Governance & ownership → Safety by design → Moderation → Incident response → Review

Here's what that sequence looks like in practice.

1. Start with platform and access

Before you think about building a community, moderation or community rules, decide who should be able to access your space and that includes and not limited to:

• Who is eligible to join?

• What age range is the community designed for?

• How will age be established or verified?

• Who approves membership?

• What happens when a member ages into or out of the community?

• What happens when someone no longer participates in the program?

Age gating deserves it’s own attention, because most organisation make platform decisions first and try to solve the age and access questions later once the community is already operating and that can leave you with a system that wasn’t actually designed for your actual users.

2. Assign ownership before you assign moderators

Before recruiting or assigning moderators, someone within the organisation should have clear ownership of the digital community and the decisions made within it.

That person doesn’t necessarily need to moderate every conversation, their responsibilities is to make sure the organisation knows:

• who makes safety decisions

• who manages moderators

• who handles escalated incidents

• who communicates with parents, carers or partner organisations when necessary

• who reviews whether the system is working

Without clear ownership, moderation become a series of individual decisions without anyone being accountable for the bigger picture.

3. Set your safety-by-design defaults

Most communities rely on a page of community guidelines to create a safe environment but your platform’s default settings often do more protective work for your community than a document.

Before you write a community guidelines page decide:

• Who can message whom?

• Can young people contact adults/ team member privately?

• Can strangers discover or contact members?

• What information is visible to other members?

• What features are available by default?

• Which features should require an opt-in?

• Can member report content or messages easily?

• Who receives those reports?

The goal is to make the safer behaviour the easiest behaviour in the community.

4. Choose your moderation model

Once you understand what your platform’s safety features or defaults, you can now decide how human moderation should work.

There isn’t one model that works for every youth organisation, you can use:

• Adult-led moderation : for programs where safeguarding oversight needs to be central

• Youth-led moderation: where trained young people have meaningful responsibilities and support

• A hybrid model: a combination of young participation with adult safeguarding oversight.

It isn’t simply about who moderates, it’s about who has the training, authority and support to act when something happens.

5. Write your incident response protocol before you need it

A community can have excellent rules and still encounter an accident, someone may report harassment, a young person may disclose something concerning, an adult may behave inappropriately, a concern may occur through a private message.

You don’t want to decide on what happens for the first time while an incident is unfolding, so you should already have a protocol:

• What counts as an incident?

• Who receives the report?

• How quickly should different types of reports be reviewed?

• When should content or accounts be restricted?

• When does an issue become a safety matter?

• Who needs to be notified?

• What records should be kept?

• When should external services or authorities be involved?

The details depends on your organisation, age group and jurisdiction, the important thing is to have the decision pathway established before you need it.

6. Set a review cycle from day one

A safe digital community isn’t something you configure once and forget. Your users will change, they will definitely grow, your programs will change, platforms will also introduce new features, regulations will change and incidents will reveal weaknesses you couldn’t anticipate at launch.

Set a fixed review cycle from the beginning, we recommend that you review your community at least every six months, and sooner after a significant incident, platform change or regulatory change.

At each review, ask:

• What has changed?

• What incidents or near-misses have occurred?

• Are members using the platform in ways we didn’t anticipate?

• Are our access controls still appropriate/

• Are moderation responsibilities still clear?

• Are young people being heard?

• What should we change before the next review?

That’s the steps that turn online safety by design from a policy document into an ongoing practice.

06 Action Plan: What to Do Next

1. This week: Read the ban context in Chapter 1 with your leadership team if you haven't already, make sure everyone's working from the same understanding of what it does and doesn't require of you.

1. This month: Walk through the Five Pillars (Chapter 3) as a team and identify which one your organisation is weakest on. Most organisations we spoke with were strong on one or two pillars and had never addressed the rest.

2. Before you touch any platform: Run through the seven things a safe community needs (Chapter 4) and be honest about which ones you can currently answer yes to.

3. Next: Move to Part 2: How to Choose or Build the Right Platform to work through the first two steps of the Build Sequence in detail.

07 FAQ

What is Australia's under-16 social media ban, in plain terms?

A 2024 law requiring major platforms including Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, and Facebook to take reasonable steps to stop under-16s holding accounts, in effect since 10 December 2025.

Does the ban apply to private youth organisation communities?

No. It targets specific major platforms, not private or closed community tools. Organisations should still apply safety-by-design principles regardless of whether the law technically covers a given tool.

Is there evidence the ban is improving youth mental health?

Not yet. eSafety's own multi-year evaluation, run with the Stanford Social Media Lab, is due to report findings across 2027 and 2028.

Why can't young people just go back to offline-only connection?

Research consistently finds young people struggle to identify offline substitutes for what online spaces gave them, self-expression, belonging, mood regulation, and peer support, particularly for those with limited transport, geographic isolation, or social anxiety.

What's the single most important thing to get right first?

Ownership and access decisions, in that order, see the next article. Most of the failure cases practitioners described to us stemmed from platform or governance decisions made too late, after a community already existed.

Who loses the most when young people are cut off from online communities?

LGBTQI+ youth (particularly those not yet publicly out), neurodivergent young people, and those in geographically isolated areas were repeatedly named across NARU's interviews as the groups losing the most, designing bounded, safe alternatives matters most for exactly these groups.

08 Methodology & Sources

This guide draws on three layers of evidence: NARU's original interviews, published third-party research, and NARU's own synthesis of the two.

NARU's original research

The guide is primarily informed by NARU Research: Interviewee Perspectives on Australia's Under-16 Social Media Ban, based on 20 semi-structured interviews with program managers, educators and thought leaders working in youth-facing services.

The interviews were conducted between July and September 2026. Practitioner quotes and named examples in this guide come from those conversations. The full research digest, including interviewee profiles and cited quotations, is available separately.

Published research

We also drew on research and guidance from:

• eSafety Commissioner. (2026). Attitudes of children and parents to social media age restrictions ahead of implementation. Australian Government.

• eSafety Commissioner. (2025). Social media age restrictions. Australian Government.

• Young and Resilient Research Centre, Western Sydney University, in partnership with the eSafety Commissioner. Consultations with young people to inform the eSafety Commissioner's Engagement Strategy for Young People.

• Prevention United. (2026). Navigating artificial intelligence for youth mental health

• Maidment, K., Tonna, Z., Houlihan, M., & Carbone, S. (2024). The impact of screentime and social media on the mental health of young Australians. Melbourne: Prevention United.

• Verghese, A. (2025). Instagram Teen Accounts fail to protect children, safety tools testing reveals. Fairplay.

• United Nations Human Rights Office. (2026). Getting Children's Safety Online Right.

• Yoon, J., Zhang, A. X., & Seering, J. (2025). "It's Great Because It's Ran By Us": Empowering Teen Volunteer Discord Moderators to Design Healthy and Engaging Youth-Led Online Communities. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 9(2), 1–30.

Limitations

NARU's interview sample of 20 practitioners was not designed to be statistically representative. It reflects people working in youth-facing roles rather than a random cross-section of the sector or young people themselves.

Where evidence is still developing, particularly around the effects of Australia's social media age restrictions, we have identified that uncertainty rather than presenting assumptions as findings.

Update Triggers

We will revisit this article when: eSafety releases findings from its Social Media Minimum Age evaluation (expected progressively across 2027–2028); the list of platforms covered by the Act changes; or new peer-reviewed research on youth digital communities is published.

Continue to Part 2: How to Choose or Build the Right Platform for Your Youth Organisation →