Reddit to comply with Australia's legally erroneous' under-16 social media ban

"We'll start predicting whether users in Australia may be under 16 and will ask them to verify they're old enough to use Reddit, the site said. We'll do this through a new privacy-preserving model designed to better help us protect young users from both holding accounts and accessing adult content before they're old enough. If you're predicted to be under 16, you'll have an opportunity to appeal and verify your age."

"Documents obtained by Guardian Australia under freedom of information laws include a September letter from Reddit to eSafety in response to the regulator's initial contact with Reddit to ask whether it believed the ban should apply to the platform. In the letter the company argued it was not a social media platform as defined in the law. The sole or significant purpose of our platform is to provide knowledge-sharing in timely, context-rich conversations; interaction between end-users is simply an incidental step to enabling this primary purpose, Reddit said in the letter."

Reddit will implement measures to comply with Australia's under-16 social media ban. New users in Australia must provide their birth date at signup, and existing account holders will be assessed by an age-prediction model. The company says it will use a privacy-preserving model to identify users who may be under 16 and offers an appeal and verification process for those flagged. Reddit described the ban as legally erroneous and arbitrary and told the eSafety commissioner that the platform is primarily for knowledge-sharing in pseudonymous, context-rich conversations rather than real-time social networking among young people.

Read at www.theguardian.com