Reddit challenges Australia's under-16 social media ban, claims law curbs political discussion

Global online forum Reddit filed a court challenge on Friday to Australia’s law banning children younger than 16 from holding accounts on the world’s most popular social media platforms.

California-based Reddit Inc.’s suit filed in the High Court follows a case filed last month by Sydney-based rights group Digital Freedom Project.

Both suits claim the world-first law is unconstitutional because it infringes on Australia’s implied freedom of political communication.

“We believe there are more effective ways for the Australian government to accomplish our shared goal of protecting youth, and the SMMA (Social Media Minimum Age) law carries some serious privacy and political expression issues for everyone on the Internet,” Reddit said in a statement.

“While we agree with the importance of protecting people under 16, this law has the unfortunate effect of forcing intrusive and potentially insecure verification processes on adults as well as minors, isolating teens from the ability to engage in age-appropriate community experiences (including political discussions), and creating an illogical patchwork of which platforms are included and which aren’t,” Reddit added.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's government declined to comment on the merits of Reddit's challenge.

“The Albanese government is on the side of Australian parents and kids, not platforms,” a government statement said.

“We will stand firm to protect young Australians from experiencing harm on social media. The matter is before the courts so it is not appropriate to comment further,” the statement added.

Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Kick, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, X, YouTube, and Twitch face fines of up to 49.5 million Australian dollars (€28.1 million) from Wednesday if they fail to take reasonable steps to remove the accounts of Australian children younger than 16.

Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, the law’s enforcer, sent compulsory information notices to the 10 age-restricted platforms on Thursday demanding data on how many accounts of young children they had deactivated since the law took effect on Wednesday.

Inman Grant had predicted that some platforms might have been waiting to receive their first notice or their first fine for noncompliance before mounting a legal challenge.

ESafety will send six monthly notices to gauge how effectively the platforms are complying.

Despite the court challenge, Reddit said it would comply with the law and would continue to engage with eSafety.

Australian children already looking for alternatives

Australian children are searching for alternatives to the age-restricted platforms. Downloads of Yope, an app for sharing photos within friend groups, increased by 251 per cent since Monday, according to Apptopia, an intelligence platform analysing mobile apps.

Downloads of Lemon8 — a photo- and video-sharing app which, like TikTok, was created by ByteDance — increased by 88 per cent.

ESafety said it has written to Yope, Lemon8 and other smaller apps to ask them to self-assess whether they meet the definition of an age-restricted platform. If they do, they also face fines if they don’t exclude young children.

Experts say policing age restrictions in the rapidly evolving social media landscape is like a game of Whack-a-Mole. But government authorities expect a more fragmented social media marketplace would not appeal as strongly to young children who fear exclusion from their peers and missing out.

The platforms’ age-verification options were to ask for copies of identification documents, use a third party to apply age-estimation technology to analyse an account holder’s face, or make inferences from data already available, such has how long an account has been held.

The government hasn't told the platforms how to check ages, but has said requesting all account holders verify their ages would be unnecessarily intrusive, given the tech giants already have sufficient personal data on most people to perform that task.

For privacy reasons, the platforms also cannot compel users to provide government-issued identification.

Documents filed with the court registry show Reddit will ask the seven High Court judges to rule the law is invalid.

Alternatively, the company wants the court to prevent the government from listing Reddit among the age-restricted platforms.

The High Court will hold a preliminary hearing in late February to set a date for Digital Freedom Project's challenge on behalf of two 15-year-olds. It is not yet clear whether the two challenges would be heard together.