This week, Australia announced a ban on young people under 16 years of age from accessing a range of social media applications, including TikTok, YouTube and Instagram, and the platform would face a fine of $49.5 million (approximately $33 million) if it failed to clean up users under 16. However, the law was boycotted only a few days after its entry into force, and on 12 December Reddit challenged the ban.
Reddit challenged the legality of the law in court documents, claiming that it “violated the hidden freedom of political communication” and requested a review by the High Court of Australia. Reddit also argued that, as an online discussion forum for adults, it should be excluded from the government ban platform list. In a statement, Reddit stated: “As opposed to other platforms covered by the law, the vast majority of Reddit users are adults, and we do not market or target advertising for children under 18 years of age. In short, users under the age of 16 are not an important sub-market for Reddit and we have no intention of targeting it.”
Reddit quoted its age rating of “over 17” in Apple Application Stores as saying that the best way to verify age was at the application store level, rather than requiring each platform to verify itself. His spokesperson said that the Platform ‘ s age validation involved serious privacy issues and that the collection of personal data increased the risk of leakage or hacker attacks. The speaker also noted that there was some inconsistency in the Government ‘ s choice of which platforms to ban, and that some applications with a large number of user groups under the age of 16 (e.g. Reblox, Pinterest and WhatsApp) were not included in the ban list, but stressed that the list was still under review. Reddit is not the only technology company that denounces the ban, and Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is concerned that young people may turn to the dark corners of the weaker Internet in search of peer-to-peer socialization. The Australian Government spokesman responded that the authorities were “on the side of Australian parents and children rather than on the side of the platform” and said “we will be determined to protect Australian youth from social media”. Reddit’s case was independent of a lawsuit filed last month by an Internet power organization, which also sought to overturn the law on the grounds of “unfair” violations of freedom of expression.
Australia ‘ s ban is receiving close global attention, and New Zealand and Malaysia are considering similar restrictions. The Government recognized that the ban was far from perfect at an early stage and that young people would still find loopholes to circumvent the restrictions. The Australian Government stressed, however, the need for unprecedented measures to protect children from the effects of “predatory algorithms”, which were rife with bullying, pornography and violence on mobile phones.
