Reddit Told Australia's Highest Court It Isn't Social Media, and Called the Under-16 Ban Inept

Australia was the first country to kick under-16s off social media. Now the first legal challenge to that ban has reached the country's highest court, and the company bringing it is Reddit.

On Tuesday, Reddit's lawyer Perry Herzfeld stood before the seven judges of the High Court in Canberra and called the law "ill thought out," "inept" and a "profound restriction on political debate," Reuters reported. He said it was "a very substantial restriction on what young people can now do," one that could stop them creating content and responding to posts.

Two arguments, one target

Reddit, joined by a libertarian advocacy group, is making two cases at once. The first is constitutional: the ban, it says, violates the implied freedom of political communication that Australian courts read into the constitution.

The second is about what Reddit actually is. The company says it is organised around topic forums, not networks of personal connections, so it should not fall under a social media law at all.

Reddit says it supports the goal of protecting children. Its complaint is that the law does not work. It does not spell out clear steps platforms must take to keep minors off, and it ignores other places where bullying happens, including gaming platforms. Much of Reddit is readable without logging in anyway, which the company says undercuts the whole point.

A ban that is still leaking

The law came into force in late 2025, requiring major platforms to stop under-16s from holding accounts. Since then the government has doubled the maximum penalty to A$99 million (about US$69.5 million), widened the eSafety Commissioner's powers to demand information, and started preparing enforcement action against major platforms.

The results so far are thin. Research by the eSafety Commissioner's own office found most under-16s still use social media, and studies show teens get around the ban, sometimes with nothing more than a VPN.

Canberra digs in

Communications minister Anika Wells is named as a defendant, and she framed the case as a culture war. "We are here to defend a fundamental tenet of Australian democracy, which is an Australian's right, and particularly an Australian child's right, to be free from harm," she said outside court. "We seek to defend that from sustained ideological attack." She also said she would respect the court's decision.

Inside, government lawyer Joanna Davidson told the judges children are more susceptible than adults to addictive platform features because their brains are still developing. She continues her arguments on Wednesday.

Australia has not been shy about squaring up to big American tech companies. Weeks ago a Senate inquiry asked Sam Altman and Dario Amodei to explain themselves in public after an OpenAI agent accessed Medicare statistics. This time it is an American platform taking Canberra to court.

Whatever the judges decide is final. There is no appeal from the High Court. Governments across Europe and Asia are weighing their own age limits, and in the US platforms are fighting lawsuits over social media addiction, so plenty of people outside Australia will be reading the judgment closely.

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