The teen social media ban spreading across Western governments could end up doing Big Tech a favor, Bluesky‘s chief operating officer warned Wednesday, arguing that heavy compliance burdens will crowd out smaller platforms and leave a handful of dominant players with even less competition.
| Detail | Value |
|---|---|
| Australia law passed | 28 November 2024 |
| Minimum age, Australian users | 16 (up from 13) |
| eSafety notification to Bluesky | 12 November 2025 |
| Bluesky age checks live | 10 December 2025 |
| Non-compliance fine (Australia) | Up to A$49.5 million (~$35 million) |
| Bluesky total users (March 2025) | 43 million |
Rose Wang, Bluesky’s COO, spoke to CNBC on the sidelines of SXSW London. Her concern isn’t regulation itself. It’s scale. “Basically, we’re living in a world where it’s almost impossible for smaller entrants to come in and build healthier spaces,” she said, pointing to compliance teams at large platforms that already outnumber Bluesky’s entire 40-person staff.
Teen Social Media Ban Creates Compliance Asymmetry
The teen social media ban that Wang is reacting to moved quickly. Australia’s Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024 was introduced to parliament on 21 November 2024 and cleared both houses just seven days later, on 28 November. The law bars under-16s from social media platforms entirely, requiring services to implement age verification through methods like facial estimation, uploaded ID, or linked bank details.
Bluesky had to respond to it directly. The platform previously set its minimum age at 13. Under Australia’s framework, the eSafety Commissioner notified Bluesky on 12 November 2025 that it qualified as an Age-Restricted Social Media Platform, pushing the minimum age for Australian accounts to 16.
The compliance process had already been underway. According to eSafety FOI documents, Bluesky met with the Commissioner on 7 October 2025 and confirmed it had self-assessed as an Age-Restricted Social Media Platform, outlining its compliance plans at that meeting. Age assurance checks for Australian users went live on 10 December 2025, according to the eSafety Commissioner’s guide to Bluesky.
For Meta or Alphabet, that kind of regulatory engagement is a line item. For a 40-person company, it consumes significant organizational bandwidth. That’s the core of Wang’s argument: the compliance cost isn’t proportional to size, so the rules structurally favor incumbents.
A Small Platform in a Consolidating Market
Bluesky’s position in this debate is awkward. The platform counts 43 million users as of March 2025, roughly 10% of X’s estimated 450 million. It’s an alternative, but a distant one. Daily mobile active users reportedly fell 40% over the 12 months through October last year, a stretch that followed an earlier surge when users fled X after Elon Musk’s acquisition.
The platform was originally created inside Twitter in 2019, spun off in 2021, and carries the endorsement of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. Its open-source structure is central to its identity and to Wang’s argument: decentralized platforms, by design, tend to run leaner than ad-driven networks. That makes blanket regulation harder to absorb.
Wang isn’t asking for a carve-out. She’s asking for proportionality. “Regulation needs to work together with innovation,” she said. “There needs to be basically more channels between the smaller, medium-sized players and small businesses with regulators, because they need to be protected, while also then the very Big Tech players who we know are circumventing regulation need to be regulated.”
Australia has set the template other governments are now studying. The U.K., Spain, France, and Austria are all at various stages of proposing similar restrictions. In the U.S., a national ban looks less likely than a patchwork of state-level laws, which would create its own compliance complexity for smaller platforms operating across multiple jurisdictions.
Whether regulators build tiered frameworks that account for platform size will likely determine how much of the teen-safety push actually benefits the incumbents it is meant to police.
