Reddit Says Its Not a Social Media Platform in Suit Against Australia

A new law barring children below 16 from opening or sustaining social media accounts took impact final week in Australia, forcing platforms to deactivate accounts for swaths of younger customers.

Within the phrases of Taylor Swift, nevertheless, Reddit would very very similar to to be excluded from this narrative as a result of, it says, it is not a social media platform.

Reddit made the argument in a lawsuit it filed in opposition to the Commonwealth of Australia and its Minister of Communications on Friday. The Australian regulation is supposed to guard younger individuals from what it says are the dangerous and addictive results of social media use.

Reddit is looking for to overturn the nation’s new regulation, which it says “infringes the implied freedom of political communication.”

As a part of the authorized submitting, Reddit additionally pushed again at being labeled an “age-restricted social media platform” inside the that means of Australia’s regulation.

As an alternative, Reddit mentioned it “operates as a group of public fora organized by topic.”

“That’s as a result of it’s not the case that the only real function, or a big function, of Reddit is to allow ‘on-line social interplay’ between two or extra end-users,” the corporate mentioned in its 12-page authorized submitting.

The corporate added that, typically, customers do not know one another’s actual identities.

“Reddit doesn’t import contact lists or tackle books. The ‘upvote/downvote’ performance permits customers to point how useful they discovered the knowledge that was posted by an end-user,” the corporate mentioned within the lawsuit. “It isn’t supposed for use as a method for customers to precise any view in regards to the poster themselves. On this method, Reddit is considerably completely different from different websites that enable for customers to grow to be ‘buddies’ with each other, or to put up images about themselves, or to organise occasions.”

Reddit, based in 2005, permits customers to put up and reply to these posts on “subreddits” devoted to virtually any subject possible. Customers have the choice to upvote or downvote posts and might ship one another direct messages. Whereas Reddit customers can use their actual names, most of them function anonymously.

The corporate went public in 2024 with a valuation of $6.4 billion.

Reddit elaborated on its argument in an announcement addressed to its customers, which was shared on the platform final week.

“This regulation is utilized to Reddit inaccurately, since we’re a discussion board primarily for adults and we do not have the standard social media options the federal government has taken challenge with,” the corporate mentioned within the assertion.

Australia’s new regulation, which might place the onus on social media platforms to confirm customers’ ages, has drawn criticism from different corporations it targets as nicely, resembling TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, and Meta, which owns Fb and Instagram.

Reddit, which says it’s complying with the regulation, instructed its customers that doing so might have unintended penalties.

“This regulation has the unlucky impact of forcing intrusive and doubtlessly insecure verification processes on adults in addition to minors, isolating teenagers from the flexibility to interact in age-appropriate neighborhood experiences (together with political discussions), and creating an illogical patchwork of which platforms are included and which are not,” the corporate mentioned.

Australia is not the one nation contemplating proscribing social media use amongst younger individuals.

Malaysia plans to ban kids below 16 from having social media accounts in 2026. In Norway and Denmark, lawmakers have proposed legal guidelines that will ban social media accounts for kids below 15.

A handful of US senators earlier this yr launched the Kids Off Social Media Act, which might bar social media platforms from permitting kids below 13 years previous to create or preserve accounts. The act would additionally bar platforms from utilizing algorithms to focus on kids below 17.

“Australia is stepping as much as defend youngsters from the addictive and dangerous content material being continuously fed to them on social media. It is now time for Congress to do the identical and go the Children Off Social Media Act,” Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, a Democrat, mentioned in an announcement to Enterprise Insider.