Technology & Science
Reddit Files High Court Challenge to Australia’s Under-16 Social Media Ban
On 14-15 Dec 2025, Reddit sued the Australian Commonwealth in the High Court, claiming the new under-16 social-media account ban is unconstitutional and arguing Reddit is not a “social media platform.”
Focusing Facts
- The lawsuit, lodged 14 Dec 2025, asks judges to exempt Reddit by asserting it lacks the statutory “significant purpose” of enabling online social interaction and infringes the implied freedom of political communication.
- Australia’s Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act, effective 10 Dec 2025, threatens non-compliant services with fines up to A$49.5 million (≈US$33 million).
- Authorities say roughly 200,000 TikTok accounts were already deleted under the law, part of an estimated 1 million Australian minors affected across platforms.
Context
Tech firms contesting youth-access rules echoes the 1930s U.S. radio fights over children’s programming and the 1997 challenge to the U.S. Communications Decency Act, when courts balanced emerging-medium harms against speech rights. Australia’s move fits a century-long pattern: every new mass medium—comic books in the 1950s, video games in the 1990s—faces protectionist child-safety regulation until norms and data settle. Long-term, the suit spotlights two structural trends: governments’ growing willingness to impose age-gating and biometric verification, and platforms’ efforts to re-brand themselves (forum vs. social network) to dodge sector-specific rules. Whether the High Court upholds or strikes the ban will shape global precedent as other nations from Norway to Malaysia draft copy-cat laws; on a 100-year timeline it gauges how liberal democracies reconcile adolescent autonomy, privacy, and free expression with algorithmic environments that did not exist even twenty years ago.
Perspectives
Australian academic and centrist media outlets
e.g., The Conversation, Yahoo!7 News — They contend Reddit is plainly a social-media site and expect the High Court to dismiss its attempt to dodge Australia’s under-16 ban. By focusing on the weaknesses of Reddit’s legal semantics and largely endorsing the eSafety Commission’s list, they gloss over broader free-speech worries and thus tilt toward regulatory orthodoxy.
Tech-industry and civil-liberties oriented outlets
e.g., Business Insider, NewstalkZB — They highlight Reddit’s claim that the law stifles political communication and portray the platform as a legitimate challenger to an over-broad, privacy-invasive ban. Catering to a tech-savvy, pro-innovation audience, these reports echo corporate talking points and play down evidence of social-media harms to minors.
Government-sympathetic and public-health framing outlets
e.g., The Daily Star, Chosun.com — They foreground ministers’ statements that the under-16 ban shields children and accuse Reddit of prioritising profits, likening its tactics to the tobacco industry. By amplifying official rhetoric about ‘reclaiming power from big tech’, these pieces risk sidelining practical enforcement flaws and teenagers’ circumvention of the ban.