Four developments this week show that laws keeping children off social media are still being fought over, and that the fight often turns on how platforms are supposed to work out a user’s age. Meta, Google and TikTok sued California over a new under-16 law. Australia’s High Court finished hearing the first major challenge to its under-16 ban. A Kenyan bill proposes age checks backed by fines of up to 10 percent of global turnover. And Britain’s online safety regulator said Snapchat has told it that effective age checks should be in place by the end of the year.
In California, the three companies filed separate suits on Wednesday naming Attorney General Rob Bonta and seeking to block Assembly Bill 1709, which Gov. Gavin Newsom signed on September 10 and which takes effect on January 1. The law bars covered platforms from providing addictive features, including personalized feeds and autoplay, to users under 16. Before providing such a feature, a platform must verify a user’s age under the state’s Digital Age Assurance Act, which relies on age data from operating systems and app stores. A platform must delete an under-16 user’s account unless it offers that user a version without those features, and fines can reach $50,000 per affected user.
The companies argue that the law violates the First Amendment and is preempted by Section 230. The Electronic Frontier Foundation objects to the checks themselves. “AB 1709 compels platforms to collect even more information from every user, invading everyone’s privacy and frustrating our ability to remain anonymous online,” said Rindala Alajaji, its associate director of state affairs.
Australia’s High Court reserved its decision after two days of hearings this week in challenges by Reddit and the advocacy group Digital Freedom Project. The ban, which took effect last December, requires 10 platforms to take reasonable steps to stop Australians under 16 from creating or keeping accounts, and the eSafety Commissioner said in July that more than 5 million accounts had been removed or deactivated. The challengers say it places an unreasonable burden on the implied freedom of political communication, and their case leans on how age assurance has worked in practice. The Digital Freedom Project’s submissions said many children under 16 had found ways to dodge age-assurance technologies, while Reddit’s said that “the evidence so far is that the effectiveness of the ban has been limited.” Commonwealth lawyer Stephen Lloyd told the judges the burden was “indirect in nature and modest in extent.” A verdict is expected to take months.
Kenya is at an earlier stage. The Online Safety Bill 2026, sponsored by member of Parliament Mark Mwenje and published in the Kenya Gazette on October 29 for introduction in the National Assembly, would require services such as Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, X and TikTok to use highly effective age verification or age estimation, and to obtain parental consent before anyone under 18 can use them. The methods it lists for confirming parental responsibility include credit card checks, cross-referencing a parent’s identity and decentralized digital identity verification. Providers in breach could face fines of up to KSh500 million or 10 percent of annual global turnover, whichever is higher, and senior executives could face up to five years in prison.
In Britain, Ofcom said on Friday that Snapchat has begun turning off its Find Friends feature by default for child users, a change it committed to in May, and has told the regulator that effective age checks for under-18s should be in place by the end of the year. Ofcom says 32 percent of British children aged 8 to 12 use Snapchat despite its minimum age of 13. The regulator has separately identified four age check methods for the UK’s under-16 social media ban.
Elsewhere, governments are writing the method into the rules. Türkiye’s under-15 rule, which took effect this month, relies on age tokens from the e-Devlet government portal, and Greece’s under-15 ban, due to start on January 1, names the government’s digital wallet among its permitted tools.
Others have hit limits of their own. The European Commission has frozen Austria’s under-14 ban, and France’s top court struck down a similar law on free expression grounds.
Taken together, what counts as knowing a user’s age now ranges from operating system signals in California to reasonable steps in Australia and government tokens in Türkiye. California’s version is due to take effect on January 1 unless a court blocks it.
Sources: Courthouse News, California Legislature, TechCrunch, ABC News, Al Jazeera, Al Jazeera: Nov. 4 hearing, AAP via Yahoo News, Kenya National Assembly: Online Safety Bill, Business Daily, Reuters via The Star
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By the ID Tech Editorial Team
