A new law barring children under 16 from opening or maintaining social media accounts took effect last week in Australia, forcing platforms to deactivate accounts for swaths of young users.
In the words of Taylor Swift, however, Reddit would very much like to be excluded from this narrative because, it says, it’s not a social media platform.
Reddit made the argument in a lawsuit it filed against the Commonwealth of Australia and its Minister of Communications on Friday. The Australian law is meant to protect young people from what it says are the harmful and addictive effects of social media use.
Reddit is seeking to overturn the country’s new law, which it says “infringes the implied freedom of political communication.”
As part of the legal filing, Reddit also pushed back at being labeled an “age-restricted social media platform” within the meaning of Australia’s law.
Instead, Reddit said it “operates as a collection of public fora arranged by subject.”
“That is because it is not the case that the sole purpose, or a significant purpose, of Reddit is to enable ‘online social interaction’ between two or more end-users,” the company said in its 12-page legal filing.
The company added that, in most cases, users don’t know each other’s real identities.
“Reddit does not import contact lists or address books. The ‘upvote/downvote’ functionality enables users to indicate how helpful they found the information that was posted by an end-user,” the company said in the lawsuit. “It is not intended to be used as a way for users to express any view about the poster themselves. In this way, Reddit is significantly different from other sites that allow for users to become ‘friends’ with one another, or to post photos about themselves, or to organise events.”
Reddit, founded in 2005, allows users to post and reply to those posts on “subreddits” dedicated to almost any topic imaginable. Users have the option to upvote or downvote posts and can send each other direct messages. While Reddit users can use their real names, most of them operate anonymously.
The company went public in 2024 with a valuation of $6.4 billion.
Reddit elaborated on its argument in a statement addressed to its users, which was shared on the platform last week.
“This law is applied to Reddit inaccurately, since we’re a forum primarily for adults and we don’t have the traditional social media features the government has taken issue with,” the company said in the statement.
Australia’s new law, which would place the onus on social media platforms to verify users’ ages, has drawn criticism from other companies it targets as well, such as TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.
Reddit, which says it is complying with the law, told its users that doing so could have unintended consequences.
“This law has the unfortunate effect of forcing intrusive and potentially insecure verification processes on adults as well as minors, isolating teens from the ability to engage in age-appropriate community experiences (including political discussions), and creating an illogical patchwork of which platforms are included and which aren’t,” the company said.
Australia isn’t the only country considering restricting social media use among young people.
Malaysia plans to ban children under 16 from having social media accounts in 2026. In Norway and Denmark, lawmakers have proposed laws that would ban social media accounts for children under 15.
A handful of US senators earlier this year introduced the Kids Off Social Media Act, which would bar social media platforms from allowing children under 13 years old to create or maintain accounts. The act would also bar platforms from using algorithms to target children under 17.
“Australia is stepping up to protect kids from the addictive and harmful content being constantly fed to them on social media. It’s now time for Congress to do the same and pass the Kids Off Social Media Act,” Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, a Democrat, said in a statement to Business Insider.
