Melbourne, Australia — Australian online security monitoring It said on Tuesday it is considering taking court against Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube, alleging they are not doing enough to keep Australian children under 16 off their platforms.
Australian courts can decide what steps platforms can reasonably be expected to take, experts say Law Which came into effect on December 10 and small children were banned from keeping accounts.
eSAfety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant on Tuesday released her first compliance report since the laws took effect that call for 10 platforms to remove all Australian account holders under the age of 16.
The report said that while 5 million Australian accounts were deactivated, a large number of Australian children continued to maintain accounts, create new accounts and pass the platform’s age assurance system.
Inman Grant said in a statement that his office had “significant concerns about the compliance” of half of those 10 platforms. His office was gathering evidence against the five that they had not taken “appropriate steps” to prevent young children from having accounts.
Courts could order fines of up to 49.5 million Australian dollars ($33 million) for systemic failures to comply. eSafety will decide whether to launch court action against either platform by mid-year.
Age-restricted platforms Reddit, X, Kik, Threads, and Twitch are not under investigation.
Communications Minister Anika Wells said the five platforms criticized were deliberately not complying with Australian law.
“Social media platforms are choosing to take the absolute minimum steps because they want these laws to fail,” Wells told reporters.
“This is world-leading legislation. We are the first in the world to do this. Of course they don’t want this legislation to work because they want it to have a knock-on effect on the dozens of countries that have come forward since December 10 to follow in Australia’s footsteps,” he said.
eSafety had identified “bad practices” such as platforms allowing users unlimited attempts to pass their age assurance methods and prompting users to attempt to pass age assurance methods even after declaring themselves underage.
Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, told The Associated Press it is committed to abiding by Australia’s social media ban. “We have also been clear that accurate age determination online is a challenge for the entire industry,” the statement said.
Snap Inc. said it has locked 450,000 accounts in compliance with the law and continues to lock more every day.
“Snapchat is fully committed to implementing appropriate measures under the law and supporting its underlying goal of improving online safety for young Australians,” a statement from Snap said.
TikTok declined to comment Tuesday and Alphabet Inc., which owns YouTube and Google, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Lisa Given, an informatics expert at RMIT University in Melbourne, said she expected the courts to decide whether the platforms took “reasonable steps” to exclude young children.
“If a technology company has said: Look, we’ve done age assurance, we’ve taken all these steps. That’s fair. Even if older assurance technologies are flawed, whose fault is it anyway? Should they be held accountable for a piece of technology that is not 100% and is not likely to be 100% foolproof anytime soon?” Given said.
“That’s really the essence of it: what the courts will deem appropriate,” he said.
