MELBOURNE – Australia’s online safety agency has announced it may pursue legal action against major social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube. The accusation is that these platforms aren’t doing enough to prevent children under the age of 16 from accessing their services.
Legal experts suggest that Australian courts might soon determine what measures are considered reasonable for these platforms to implement, in accordance with the new laws enacted on December 10 that ban young children from having accounts.
On Tuesday, eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant unveiled her initial compliance report following the enforcement of these laws. This report urged ten platforms to eliminate all accounts held by Australians under 16.
Despite the deactivation of 5 million Australian accounts, the report highlights that many children in Australia still manage to maintain accounts, create new ones, and circumvent the platforms’ age verification processes.
Inman Grant expressed “significant concerns” regarding the compliance of half of these platforms. Her office is actively collecting evidence against five of them, alleging they have failed to take “reasonable steps” to block young children from holding accounts.
Should systemic non-compliance be proven, the courts could impose fines reaching up to 49.5 million Australian dollars (approximately $33 million). The eSafety office will decide by midyear whether to proceed with legal action against any of these platforms.
Age-restricted platforms that aren’t under investigation are Reddit, X, Kick, Threads and Twitch.
Communications Minister Anika Wells said the five criticized platforms were deliberately not complying with Australian law.
“Social media platforms are choosing to do the absolute bare minimum because they want these laws to fail,” Wells told reporters.
“This is the world-leading law. We’re the first in the world to do it. Of course they don’t want these laws to work because they want that to be a chilling effect on the dozen countries that have come out since Dec. 10 to follow Australia’s step,” she added.
eSafety had identified “poor practices” such as platforms allowing unlimited attempts for a user to pass their age assurance methods and prompting the user to try to pass the age assurance method even after they declared themselves underage.
Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, told The Associated Press it was committed to complying with Australia’s social media ban. “We’ve also been clear that accurately determining age online is a challenge for the whole industry,” the statement said.
Snap Inc. said it has locked 450,000 accounts in compliance with the law and continued to lock more every day.
“Snapchat remains fully committed to implementing reasonable steps under the legislation and supporting its underlying goal of improving online safety for young Australians,” a Snap statement said.
TikTok declined to comment on Tuesday and Alphabet Inc., which owns YouTube and Google, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Lisa Given, an information sciences expert at RMIT University in Melbourne, said she expected the courts will decide whether platforms have taken “reasonable steps” to exclude young children.
“If a tech company has said: look, we put in age assurance, we’ve done all these steps. That’s reasonable. Even though the aged assurance technologies are flawed, whose fault is that? Should they be held accountable for a piece of technology that is not 100% and likely not going to be 100% foolproof any time soon?” Given said.
“That’s really the crux of it: what the courts will deem reasonable,” she added.
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