00:02Australia's under-16 social media ban is facing a legal challenge in the High Court brought by Reddit and the
00:09Digital Freedom Project.
00:10The two-day hearing will examine the legality of the ban, which came into effect on December 10th last year,
00:17making Australia the first country in the world to introduce such legislation.
00:22Reddit told the court that the ban was ill-thought-out and amounted to a profound restriction on political debate.
00:30They said,
00:31Barring under-16s from holding social media accounts stopped them from creating or responding to content on their means of
00:38communication,
00:39and it was profound restriction on political debate in Australia.
00:44Joanna Davidson, who represented the government,
00:46said children were more vulnerable than adults to social media's addictive features because their brains were not fully developed.
00:54A successful challenge could usher in more opposition from affected companies and slow a global uptake of similar policies.
01:03Prime Minister Albanese has a pattern of censorship in this country.
01:07We are well down the slippery slope.
01:09He tried to introduce the misinformation and disinformation bill.
01:13He's just trying now getting through the digital duty of care.
01:17He keeps strengthening the power of the e-safety commissioner.
01:20He keeps bringing in hate speech laws.
01:23And the purpose of the social media ban for the under-16s is not the welfare of under-16s.
01:28I believe that this is just a stepping stone further and further to censorship.
01:33I think they've masked it as this form of child safety, but in the end it's really just them trying
01:43to slowly gain more and more control of what young people see.
01:48We have seen in nearly a year of the social media ban, Australian children are simply not safer.
01:53The ban was always going to fail.
01:55This was lazy legislation.
01:57And we were always expecting that our beautiful digital native children would get around the ban and it just was
02:04never going to work.
02:05That's the evidence that the e-safety commissioner's own report has.
02:09And I'm really hopeful that the High Court does rule in our favour.
02:12We can scrap this legislation and we can actually make children safer by having them resilient, by having digital citizens
02:19coming into the ages as they go into their voting years,
02:22understand how the internet works, understanding how content works and being really brave and bold in those spaces.
02:30Australian Communications Minister Anika Wells had said the government will defend the law.
02:35She said they will fight the challenge to defend a fundamental tenet of Australian democracy, particularly an Australian child's right
02:44to be free from harm.
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