1 April 2026

Hi folks,

On the 10th December last year, Australia became the first country to ban social media for under-16s. With the latest wave of our GWI Kids research, we now have some of the first over-time data on young Australians before and after the ban - so this week is a special edition outlining how their online lives have (and haven’t) changed. 

Scroll down to read about which apps are the biggest winners, how it’s affected overall time spent online, and whether it’s made teens more likely to help around the house. 

PS: No newsletter next week due to Easter, but you can still get your insights fix through Agent Spark. 

Stats to power your week

➕Perhaps the most striking finding is that Australian teens are actually net supporters of the ban that affects them. 46% think it’s a good thing, while 30% think it’s a bad thing, and 19% don’t mind either way. It’s easy to assume that adolescents would rebel against the law, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

🧷The platforms that have survived the ban have seen big audience growths. Year-on-year, teen usage of Tumblr is up 241%, Pinterest is up 155%, Discord is up 39%, and even Zoom is up 116% - putting it back up to pandemic levels. 

💬With messaging apps largely unaffected by the ban, they’ve become more important to Australian teens. The share who describe WhatsApp as their favorite social platform is up 4x (4%->20%), while Facebook Messenger is up by almost 3x (6%->21%). 

🤖There are also dramatic trends outside of social media, as usage of AI tools by Australia 13-15-year-olds has gone from 19% to 44% since 2025. 

🙄And a final insight to disappoint the parents - banning social media seems to have had little effect on the number of Australian kids who help out with chores after school. 

All stats this week are from our GWI Kids data set and reference an audience of Australian 13-15 year olds, unless otherwise stated.

Meet the audience: VPN users

We’ll leave social media bans to one side for a moment and turn to a closely related topic: VPNs. They’ve entered the spotlight as a way to get around online restrictions in both Australia and the UK, which makes their users a useful (adult) audience to examine more closely.

Look past the familiar visual shorthand of a laptop by a window and the stereotype becomes obvious. You might think of VPN users as a software engineer or hacker mould: culturally underground, intensely privacy-focused, and mainly using VPNs to lock down their security. But the reality is broader than that.

For one thing, VPN users are relatively affluent. Far from simply using VPNs to hunt for cheaper subscriptions, they’re more likely to fall into high or top household income groups. They’re also more likely to be interested in other cultures or countries, which suggests VPNs may be as much about opening up access to a wider range of content as they are about privacy or protection.

And, in a finding that will surprise no one who has spent any time around VPN advertising, they’re also big podcast listeners: 20% are heavy podcast users, making them 34% more likely than average to listen heavily.

Chart of the week

Four of the five social media apps that Aussie teens used most in 2025 were blocked in the ban. Given that, you’d expect there to be a subsequent decrease in the overall time spent online. But the ban seems to have had no specific effect - what we’re seeing is the continuation of a trend since 2023 of gradually reduced time spent online (similar to what we see for the grownups).

The time budget that kids are spending on social media has stayed largely the same, it’s just directed to different places. 

But bear in mind that the data presented here comes from parents and guardians, not the kids themselves. The kids have a slightly different view, as there’s been a 19% year-on-year decrease in them feeling they spend too much time online. 

More from GWI

• Want to hear more about the research behind Australian teens? Find out more about GWI Kids here. 
• Find out why audience segmentation matters more than ever before.