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Starting on Dec. 10, 14-year-olds in Australia will theoretically not be able to post on the subreddit r/Im14andthisisdeep, nor on any subreddit at all, because Reddit is going to be placed on the country’s list of age-restricted social media platforms.
Kick, the livestreaming service, will also be restricted when the ban goes into effect, and a large swath of the social media world becomes unavailable to young people in Australia early next month.
This kind of regulation will look a bit alien to Americans. Australia has an agency called the eSafety Commissioner that serves some of the same functions as the FCC and FTC in the U.S., but with a focus on online platforms. With the stated aim of protecting children from harmful content, the Commissioner’s powers were expanded in 2022, in part due to lingering outrage over the Facebook livestreaming of the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings in neighboring New Zealand, and the subsequent spreading of that footage on many social media platforms, including Reddit.
A preliminary list of social media platforms banned for under-16s was created about a year ago after an investigation by the eSafety Commissioner, and that list keeps growing. It now includes TikTok, X, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, and now Reddit and Kick. According to the Guardian, Roblox, OpenAI’s Sora, Discord, Steam, and Twitch are also on the government’s radar, and could potentially be banned.
Australia itself isn’t designing the technology that makes this ban possible. Per the Guardian, the eSafety Commissioner, Inman Grant, explained at a press conference Wednesday that the platforms themselves have to figure out how to keep users below the age threshold from having accounts, or else they may face fines of up to 49.5 million Australian dollars. Also, the Australian government says it has published guidelines for self-assessment, and expects companies to figure out on their own if they need to ban kids and teens without government intervention.
As Grant put it, “the burden goes back onto the platforms themselves.”
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Source: Gizmodo