Online forum Reddit yesterday filed a court challenge to Australia’s world-first law that bans Australian children younger than 16 from holding accounts on social media platforms.
Reddit Inc’s suit follows a case filed last month by rights group Digital Freedom Project. Both suits 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 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. “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.”
Photo: Reuters
Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Kick, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, X, YouTube and Twitch from Wednesday face fines of up to A$49.5 million (US$33 million) if they fail to take reasonable steps to remove the accounts of Australian children younger than 16.
Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant 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.
ESafety would 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 continue to engage with eSafety.
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 percent since Monday, said Apptopia, an intelligence platform analyzing mobile apps.
Downloads of photo and video-sharing app Lemon8 increased by 88 percent, it said.
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 do not exclude young children.
The platforms’ age-verification options were to ask for copies of identification documents, use a third-party to apply age-estimation technology to analyze an account holder’s face, or make inferences from data already available, such has how long an account has been held.
The government has not 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.
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