Reddit challenges Australia’s world-first law banning children under 16 from social media

MELBOURNE, Australia — Global online forum Reddit filed a legal challenge Friday against Australia’s world-first law that bans Australian children under the age of 16 from having 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 lawsuits claim the 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 achieve our shared goal of protecting young people, and the Social Media Minimum Age (SMMA) Act poses serious privacy and political expression concerns for all internet users,” Reddit said in a statement.

“While we agree on the importance of protecting people under the age of 16, this law has the unfortunate effect of imposing intrusive and potentially unsafe verification processes on adults as well as minors, isolating teens from the opportunity to engage in age-appropriate community experiences (including political discussions), and creating an illogical patchwork of included platforms and those that are not,” Reddit added.

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

“The Albanian government stands with Australian parents and children, not the platforms,” a government statement said.

“We will remain steadfast in protecting young Australians from 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,

Australia’s e-safety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, who is responsible for enforcing the law, sent mandatory information notices to the 10 age-restricted platforms on Thursday, demanding data on how many young children’s accounts they had deactivated since the law came into force on Wednesday.

Inman Grant predicted that some platforms might wait until they receive their first notice or fine for non-compliance before taking legal action.

ESafety will send six monthly notices to assess how well platforms are complying.

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

The platforms’ age verification options included requesting copies of identity documents, using a third party to apply age estimation technology to analyze an account holder’s face, or making inferences from already available data, such as how long an account has been held.

The government has not told platforms how to verify age, but has said that asking all account holders to verify their age would be unnecessarily intrusive, given that the tech giants already have enough personal data on most people to perform this task.

For privacy reasons, platforms also cannot require users to provide government-issued ID.

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

Alternatively, the company wants the court to prevent the government from listing Reddit as an age-restricted platform.

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