Regional differences
Where an account is registered changes which protections apply automatically.
Regional differences
Australia’s under-16 social media rules: what parents actually need to do
Ten platforms went. Discord, Roblox, WhatsApp and Messenger did not. And nobody can fine your family.
Open guide → REGIONALEU / UK / AU / US: regional differences
Where your kid’s account is registered changes what defaults apply. Here’s the lay of the land.
Open guide → REGIONALUK Online Safety Act: what actually changed for parents
Why age checks appeared everywhere in July 2025
Open guide →Why location changes the defaults
Which protections a platform applies automatically depends on where the account is registered, not on where your family happens to be sitting today.
For most families that matters twice: when an account is first created, and if you move country. The guide below covers where the EU, UK, Australian and US defaults genuinely differ, and where the difference is smaller than the headlines suggest.
The date of birth entered when the account was made is doing most of this work, and it is the one thing worth checking before anything else. A child who added a year to get past a sign-up screen has switched off the regional protections along with the age gate, and no setting you change afterwards puts them back. Correcting the birthday is usually the single highest-value thing available in this section.
Read the law here as a floor, not a ceiling. A rule that obliges a platform to protect under-16s says nothing about what it does for a seventeen-year-old, and enforcement of these regimes is still being argued over. Treat regional defaults as a starting position that the rest of this site then builds on.
When parental controls change
Parental controls get renamed and moved without announcement. Roughly monthly we send new guides, changes to controls like these, and scams worth knowing about.
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