Australia Adds Reddit to Its Under-16 Social Media Ban

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, enforced by the eSafety Commissioner with penalties of up to A$49.5 million. Reddit's inclusion came late: on 4 November 2025, roughly five weeks before commencement, Communications Minister Anika Wells announced that Reddit and streaming platform Kick would join the list, saying platforms had been given twelve months' notice. Reddit was the sole forum-style discussion site included.

Inclusion turned on whether a service's 'sole or a significant purpose is to enable online social interaction,' and eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant stressed that 'the burden goes back onto the platforms themselves' to self-assess against a government assessment tool. Officials described the roster as a 'dynamic list': messaging and education services such as WhatsApp, Google Classroom and YouTube Kids were carved out, Discord, Roblox and Lego Play were left off, and eSafety said it would monitor platforms including Steam, Bluesky and OpenAI's Sora, plus the 'migratory patterns' of under-16 users, when weighing future additions.

How platforms would verify age remained unsettled, with potential methods including official ID documents, parental approval and facial recognition technology; the eSafety Commissioner indicated platforms should use a 'successive validation' or 'waterfall' approach and not rely on self-declaration alone. Polling showed most Australian adults supported the ban, but critics raised data-privacy concerns and mental-health advocates warned it could cut children off from connection. With its age limit of 16 and no parental-approval exemption, the law was described as the world's strictest.

Reddit complied when the ban commenced, then launched a challenge in the High Court of Australia arguing the policy had serious implications for privacy and political rights. 'Despite the best intentions, this law is missing the mark,' the company said, contending the law forced 'intrusive and potentially insecure verification processes on adults as well as minors' and created an 'illogical patchwork' of covered platforms. It was the second challenge to the regime, after two 15-year-olds from New South Wales argued the ban unconstitutionally infringed the implied freedom of political communication. Wells responded that the government 'will not be intimidated by big tech.'

Early enforcement validated some scepticism. An eSafety compliance report in early 2026 identified 'poor practices' across platforms, including letting users repeatedly retry the same age-assurance method and insufficient measures to stop new under-16 accounts, and Inman Grant said she would take an 'enforcement stance' toward platforms that had not taken reasonable steps. Amnesty International called the ban an 'ineffective quick fix.' 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.