Australia’s world-first ban on under-16s holding social media accounts commenced on 10 December 2025. Three months later, the interesting questions are no longer about whether Parliament would really do it, but about what the law is turning out to mean in practice, and whether it survives the constitutional challenges now stacked up in the High Court, including one from Reddit.

The regime in brief

The Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024 passed Parliament on 29 November 2024 and inserted a new minimum age regime into the Online Safety Act 2021:

Element	Detail
The obligation	Designated platforms must take reasonable steps to prevent Australians under 16 from holding accounts
Who is caught	Ten platforms designated at commencement, including Facebook, Instagram, Threads, TikTok, Snapchat, X, YouTube, Reddit, Twitch and Kick
Who is not	Messaging, gaming and education-focused services sit outside the regime, and logged-out browsing is untouched
The penalty	Up to 49.5 million dollars for systemic failure to take reasonable steps
Who is never liable	Children and parents. The entire compliance burden sits on platforms

Two design choices matter for everything that follows. The standard is reasonable steps, an outcomes-based obligation that nowhere specifies what verification effort is enough. And platforms cannot rely on government ID as their sole age check, pushing them toward inference, facial estimation and similar tools that the government’s own age assurance trial found workable but imperfect.

The first quarter

The compliance wave was real. By mid January 2026, platforms had removed or deactivated around 4.7 million under-16 accounts, including roughly 550,000 by Meta across Instagram, Facebook and Threads. The eSafety Commissioner moved immediately, issuing compulsory information notices to all ten designated platforms the day after commencement, demanding data on deactivations.

The evasion wave was equally real. Reporting within weeks of commencement described children circumventing the ban through misstated ages, repeated attempts at age-estimation checks, and VPNs. More structurally, young users migrated: downloads of Yope, a friend-group photo-sharing app, jumped 251 per cent in the week the ban began, and ByteDance’s Lemon8 user rates rose by 88 per cent. eSafety responded by writing to those apps to self-assess whether they meet the definition of an age-restricted platform, an exercise observers quickly likened to whack-a-mole.

The regime’s design bets that a fragmented social landscape exerts less gravitational pull on teenagers than the platforms their peers use; the first quarter has turned that bet into a live experiment. Underneath the numbers sits the unresolved legal question: what do reasonable steps actually require?

A platform that removes millions of declared under-16 accounts but lets a determined 14-year-old retry a face scan until it passes has taken steps. Whether they are reasonable ones is exactly the kind of judgement the outcomes-based drafting deliberately left to the regulator and, ultimately, the courts.

The constitutional front

Three challenges were on foot within days of commencement. The Digital Freedom Project filed first, on 26 November 2025, on behalf of two teenagers, with preliminary hearings listed for late February 2026. NSW Libertarian MP John Ruddick brought a separate challenge. Then, on 12 December, two days into the regime, Reddit filed in the High Court, while pointedly continuing to comply.

Reddit’s case is the most interesting of the three because it runs two distinct arguments. The first is the same constitutional claim as the others: the law is invalid because it infringes the implied freedom of political communication. The second is narrower and does not need the Constitution at all: that Reddit should not be designated in the first place, because it is a forum aimed at adults, without the features the government says make social media harmful, carrying a 17-plus App Store rating before the ban even began. Reddit calls the designation an illogical patchwork. If that limb succeeds, the law stands, but Reddit walks out from under it, an outcome with obvious appeal to every other platform contemplating its own designation.

On the other hand, the constitutional claim deserves careful framing, because the implied freedom is widely misunderstood. It is not a personal right to speak. It is a limit on legislative power, implied from the constitutional requirement that electors make an informed choice, and the question is never whether teenagers have a right to TikTok but whether the law impermissibly burdens political communication as a system. The framework from Lange v Australian Broadcasting Corporation, as refined through McCloy v New South Wales and Brown v Tasmania, asks three things: does the law burden political communication; is its purpose legitimate; and is it proportionate, in the sense of being suitable, necessary, and adequate in its balance.

On the first step, the challengers have something to work with. The designated platforms are major fora of political communication, and the law excludes an entire age cohort from participating on them while imposing age-assurance friction on adults as well, which is Reddit’s emphasis.

On the second step, the Commonwealth is on strong ground: protecting children from online harm is plainly legitimate.

The real battle is the third step, and especially necessity: were there obvious and compelling less restrictive alternatives, such as mandated safety features, parental controls or platform design duties, that would achieve the purpose with a lighter burden? The Commonwealth’s likely answers are already visible in the statute’s own architecture. Under-16s can still browse without accounts, still use messaging and gaming services, and face no penalties themselves; the burden, it will say, is modest, targeted and calibrated. The challengers will say a cohort of future electors has been removed from the main venues of public debate for years at a time, and that softer regulatory tools were never seriously tried.

Nothing about the outcome is safe to predict. What can be said is that the Court has never considered the implied freedom in a context quite like this, where the burden falls on a class of people defined by age and the justification is their own protection.

Open questions

• What will reasonable steps mean under enforcement pressure? The information notices were the opening move. Whether eSafety treats retry-friendly age checks and weak re-verification as non-compliance will define the standard far more than the statute does
• Does the migration data undermine the premise or prove the design? If under-16s simply reassemble on smaller, less-moderated apps, the harm-reduction case weakens. If the designation net expands to follow them, the regime becomes a rolling exercise in definition
• What does a ruling either way do to the wider agenda? A Commonwealth win would entrench outcomes-based age gating as a template. A loss on proportionality grounds would cast a shadow over every future online safety measure that burdens access rather than content, and the reasoning would matter as much as the result

The ban was enacted as a response. Three months in, it is better understood as a set of questions, and at least one of them is now before the High Court.