Australia's social media ban is now in force. It requires platforms to take reasonable steps to stop users under 16 from holding accounts. Drawing on five focus groups with fifteen young people aged 12--16, this paper examines how children understood the ban's effectiveness, impact, and legitimacy as they encountered the platforms charged with enforcing it. Participants widely saw the ban as unfair and ineffective. Through platform access controls, they learned how the ban worked, where it failed, and how they and their peers could evade it. We also asked participants to imagine better approaches to age verification and youth digital governance. This paper develops sneaking as a theoretical lens for these practices. The concept names more than evasion: it captures the social encounter between children, platforms, techno-regulation, and the access controls that mediate digital participation. Our findings show that children are not passive subjects of platform regulation. They interpret, test, and negotiate digital infrastructure. They also expose a central weakness in age-based platform regulation: technological controls struggle to solve the social and governance problems they are asked to contain.

翻译：澳大利亚的社交媒体禁令现已生效。该禁令要求平台采取合理措施，禁止16岁以下用户持有账户。本研究通过与15名12-16岁青少年进行的五场焦点小组访谈，考察儿童在接触实施该禁令的平台时，如何理解禁令的有效性、影响及合法性。参与者普遍认为该禁令不公且无效。通过平台访问控制机制，他们得以了解禁令如何运作、在何处失效，以及自身与同龄人如何规避限制。我们还邀请参与者设想更优的年龄验证与青少年数字治理方案。本研究提出"钻空子"（sneaking）作为这些行为的理论框架。这一概念不仅指代规避行为，更捕捉了儿童、平台、技术规制及调节数字参与的访问控制之间的社会互动。研究结果表明，儿童并非平台规制的被动接受者，他们会解读、测试并协商数字基础设施。同时，他们也揭示了基于年龄的平台规制中的核心弱点：技术管控难以解决其被赋予的社会与治理问题。