Australia High Court Reserves Verdict on Under-16 Social Media Ban

Photo: AAP

Australia's highest court has finished hearing the challenge to the world's first ban on social media accounts for children under 16, and has reserved its verdict for a later date. After two days of argument in Canberra, the seven judges will now decide whether the ban stays, is narrowed, or is struck down altogether.

It is a case the whole world is watching. Australia was the first country to bring in a ban like this, in December last year, and France and the United Kingdom have since started looking at similar rules. If the Australian government loses, those plans take a hit too.

The government spent Wednesday defending the law, and its case came down to harm. Barrister Joanna Davidson told the court that social media design features carried seven risks for children: addictive use, bad sleep, depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, worse eating disorders, and stronger symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Her colleague Stephen Lloyd went further on the other side of the argument. He told the judges the curb on political expression was indirect and modest in size, and called the ban a non-partisan and justified step, Reuters reported from the hearing. The government says the law is about cutting harm, not about stopping young people from having views.

Reddit, which brought one of the two challenges, sees it very differently. Its barrister Perry Herzfeld called the ban ill-targeted and over broad, and said Reddit should never have been on the list of 10 banned platforms at all. The Sydney based Digital Freedom Project brought the second challenge, arguing the law takes away an implied freedom of political communication in the constitution.

In his closing reply, Herzfeld said the ban produced the worst possible outcome, because children lost access to safe content but could still slip on to adult accounts, where they faced harmful material instead. That point cuts to a weakness the government itself has admitted: the ban has not worked as well as hoped.

The numbers tell that story plainly. Government data published in July showed five million accounts had been closed since the ban came into force, Al Jazeera reported. Yet four in 10 children aged 10 to 15 were still active on social media three months after the ban began, down from 52 per cent before it. Many had simply found their way round age checks, and platforms are not allowed to demand government ID papers because of privacy concerns.

The 10 banned platforms are Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Kick, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, X, YouTube and Twitch. They face fines of up to 99 million Australian dollars for systemic failures to remove young users, according to Reuters. The government said in June it was thinking about strengthening the law, and is preparing an enforcement case against some of the biggest platforms.

For parents, the wait is now the hard part. The hearing is over, but a verdict will likely take months, and until then the ban stays in place. What the judges decide will shape not just Australian childhoods, but the rules other countries write next. Technology cases with global reach are a running theme in our coverage, from the attack on supermarket fridges across Europe to the fallout from Spain's transport minister quitting over rail crashes, and the courtroom fights now matter as much as the technology itself.

The comparison at the heart of the case is simple:

Before the ban: 52 per cent of children aged 10 to 15 were active on social media.
Three months after the ban: 40 per cent were still active.
Accounts closed since December: five million.
Platforms covered: 10, from Facebook and TikTok to Reddit and YouTube.
Judges hearing the case: seven, with a verdict due in the coming months.

For now, children under 16 in Australia stay off the banned platforms, and the rest of the world waits to see if Canberra's big experiment survives its first court test.

Sources

Al Jazeera: Australian government defends social media ban for under 16s in court

Australian Associated Press: Social media ban creates 'worst outcome', Reddit argues

Associated Press: Australia argues in court that social media ban is needed to protect children's brains

The High Court will deliver its verdict in the coming months, and until then the under-16 ban stays in force.

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