International online forum Reddit has filed a lawsuit on Friday to Australia’s world-first regulation banning Australian kids under the age of 16 from having accounts on popular social media platforms in the world.
Reddit Inc., based in California, filed a lawsuit in the High Court after Sydney-based rights organisation Digital Freedom Project filed a petition last month.
Because the law violates Australia’s implied freedom of political communication, both lawsuits contend that it is unconstitutional.
“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,” it added.
The administration of Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese declined to comment on Reddit challenge.
A government statement said, “the Albanese government is on the side of Australian parents and kids, not platforms.
“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.
If they don’t take appropriate action to delete the accounts of Australian children under the age of 16, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Kick, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, X, YouTube, and Twitch could be fined up to 49.5 million Australian dollars ($32.9 million) starting on Wednesday.
The law’s enforcer, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, sent mandatory information notifications to the 10 age-restricted platforms on Thursday, requesting information on the number of accounts of young kids they had deleted since the law came into effect on Wednesday.
Inman Grant predicted that some platforms may have been holding off on filing a lawsuit until they received their first notice or penalties for noncompliance.
Six monthly notices will be sent by eSafety to assess how the platforms are complying with the social media ban.
Reddit promised to abide by the law and keep working with eSafety despite the legal action.
Children in Australia are looking for alternatives to the age-restricted platforms. According to Apptopia, an intelligence platform that analyzes mobile apps, Yope, an app for sharing images between friend groups, has had a 251 percent surge in downloads since Monday.
Lemon8, a platform like TikTok, is a photo and video sharing app that had an 88 percent increase in downloads.
ESafety has sent letters to Yope, Lemon8, and other smaller apps asking them to determine whether they qualify as age-restricted platforms. If they do and don’t exclude young children, they will also be fined.
According to experts, enforcing age restrictions in the ever-changing social media landscape is like playing a game of Whack-a-Mole. However, government officials anticipate that young children who are afraid of being left out and excluded from their friends would not be as drawn to a more fragmented social media economy.
The platforms’ options for age verification included requesting copies of identity documents, having a third party employ age-estimation technologies to examine a user’s face, or drawing conclusions from data that was previously available, such as the length of time an account has been held.
Although the government hasn’t instructed the platforms on how to verify ages, it has stated that asking all users to do so would be too invasive because the tech companies already have enough personal information on most individuals to do so.
Additionally, the platforms are not allowed to require users to present official identity for privacy reasons.
Reddit will seek the seven judges of the High Court to declare the law unconstitutional, as per the documents filed with the court’s registry.
Reddit, as an alternative, has requested that the court prevent the government from adding it to the list of age-restricted platforms.
To schedule a date for Digital Freedom Project’s challenge on behalf of two 15-year-olds, the High Court will convene a preliminary hearing in late February. Whether the two challenges will be heard jointly is still not clear.