Australia Adds Reddit to Its Under-16 Social Media Ban
December 2025
From 10 December 2025 Australia required Reddit and nine other platforms to take reasonable steps to prevent under-16s from holding accounts, backed by penalties up to A$49.5 million and overseen by the eSafety Commissioner.
What happened
Under amendments to Australia's Online Safety Act, from 10 December 2025 a defined list of platforms, including Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, X, YouTube, Twitch, Threads, and Kick, were required to take reasonable steps to prevent Australians under 16 from holding accounts. The regime is enforced by the eSafety Commissioner, with penalties of up to A$49.5 million for platforms that fail to take reasonable steps.
Reddit's inclusion confirmed that the law reached beyond the most obviously youth-oriented apps to general discussion platforms. The eSafety Commissioner indicated platforms should use a 'successive validation' or 'waterfall' approach to age assurance and should not rely on self-declaration alone.
The scheme attracted criticism over privacy and feasibility, echoing debates in the UK, with concerns about the data implications of age-assurance technologies and the practicality of reliably distinguishing minors. A subsequent eSafety compliance report identified 'poor practices' across platforms, including letting users repeatedly retry the same age-assurance method and insufficient measures to stop new under-16 accounts from being created.
The Australian regime, the first national social-media age minimum of its kind to cover a platform like Reddit, became a closely watched global test of whether broad age-gating could be enforced at scale.
Impact
Reddit became subject to one of the world's first hard minimum-age social media laws, exposing the company to multimillion-dollar penalties and feeding international debate over the privacy costs and effectiveness of mandatory age assurance.