Reddit filed a legal challenge over Australia’s new Social Media Minimum Age law.picture alliance/dpa/picture alliance via Getty Images
- Australia is now barring children under 16 from creating or maintaining social media accounts.
- Reddit says the law should be revoked, or if it’s not, it should be exempt.
- The company argued that it’s not a social media platform in a new lawsuit.
A new law barring children under 16 from opening or maintaining social media accounts took effect last week in Australia, forcing platforms to deactivate accounts for swaths of young users.
In the words of Taylor Swift, however, Reddit would very much like to be excluded from this narrative because, it says, it’s not a social media platform.
Reddit made the argument in a lawsuit it filed against the Commonwealth of Australia and its Minister of Communications on Friday. The Australian law is meant to protect young people from what it says are the harmful and addictive effects of social media use.
Reddit is seeking to overturn the country’s new law, which it says “infringes the implied freedom of political communication.”
As part of the legal filing, Reddit also pushed back at being labeled an “age-restricted social media platform” within the meaning of Australia’s law.
Instead, Reddit said it “operates as a collection of public fora arranged by subject.”
“That is because it is not the case that the sole purpose, or a significant purpose, of Reddit is to enable ‘online social interaction’ between two or more end-users,” the company said in its 12-page legal filing.
The company added that, in most cases, users don’t know each other’s real identities.
“Reddit does not import contact lists or address books. The ‘upvote/downvote’ functionality enables users to indicate how helpful they found the information that was posted by an end-user,” the company said in the lawsuit. “It is not intended to be used as a way for users to express any view about the poster themselves. In this way, Reddit is significantly different from other sites that allow for users to become ‘friends’ with one another, or to post photos about themselves, or to organise events.”
Reddit, founded in 2005, allows users to post and reply to those posts on “subreddits” dedicated to almost any topic imaginable. Users have the option to upvote or downvote posts and can send each other direct messages. While Reddit users can use their real names, most of them operate anonymously.
Our Gest: https://ca.news.yahoo.com/news/articles/reddit-arguing-collection-public-fora-010504264.html
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