Australia will soon become the first nation to ban children under 16 from creating accounts on many social media platforms, but the law is already facing criticism as some platforms will be excluded.

Beginning on Wednesday, December 10, Australia will require social media platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube, to take “reasonable steps” to block children under 16 years old from creating accounts. Any platform that fails to restrict children under 16 from gaining access could face civil penalties of up to $49.5 million, according to the government’s eSafety Commissioner.

“We haven’t really seen a plan like this be put into action,” said Jessica Melugin, the director of the Center for Technology & Innovation at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. “So I think the world is certainly watching.”

Along with Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube, the Australian government also lists Kick, Reddit, Snapchat, Threads, and X as “age-restricted” social media platforms. Numerous social media platforms, however, will not be affected by the law, including messaging platforms and gaming apps such as Discord, Roblox, and Steam. Australia’s decision to keep those platforms off its age-restricted list has raised more questions about whether the law will keep children away from online harm.

“It is a little bit of a red flag. I don’t agree with doing it this way at all, but it does make it harder for the government to make its case when you have gaming apps and AI chatbots exempted,” said Melugin. “It seems like a strange line to draw.”

The Australian government says the new law is popular with parents and would reduce the number of risks that children are exposed to online, the BBC reported.

“Delaying children’s access to social media accounts gives them valuable time to learn and grow, free of the powerful, unseen forces of harmful and deceptive design features such as opaque algorithms and endless scroll,” said Australian eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman. “This important normative change will be invaluable to parents and young people alike – creating friction or a check in the online ecosystem that previously did not exist.”

To support its move, the Australian government cited a study that it commissioned earlier this year, which found that more than 70% of children between 10-15 who use social media are exposed to harmful content. The government says that harmful online content includes “sexist, misogynistic or hateful content, content depicting dangerous online challenges or fight videos, or content that encourages unhealthy eating or exercise habits.”

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The first-of-its-kind law is already receiving some strong pushback.

Melugin told The Daily Wire that she has some major concerns about the new law.

“We live in a digital world. That’s how you are going to maybe find your partner one day. It’s probably how you’re going to find a job one day, maybe how you promote yourself or your business, maybe how you keep in touch with friends and pursue your interests,” Melugin said.

She added that the law could create a “false sense of security” for parents, who she argues would take a step back from monitoring their children’s social media. “They think, ‘Well, the government has now stepped in with its magic wand and silver bullet and now everything is safe,’ which certainly won’t be the case,” Melugin added.

Melugin argued that the best way to keep children safe online is for parents to keep having conversations with their kids on “how to keep yourself safe online, how to avoid making mistakes online.”

Australia’s exclusions for Roblox, Discord, Steam, and other platforms have also come under scrutiny. Roblox, an online gaming platform marketed toward children, has been criticized for allowing adults to use the platform alongside children, and even the Australian government has acknowledged that Roblox has given pedophiles an open door to “groom children.”

Roblox was also sued by Texas last month, with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton calling the children’s gaming platform “a habitual destination for child predators.”

An Australian government official told The Daily Wire that “gaming and messaging services were excluded under the legislative rules.” The official also directed The Daily Wire to a press release from September, showing that Roblox committed to introduce new safety measures for its site in response to concerns raised by the Australian government.

“We know that when it comes to platforms that are popular with children, they also become popular with adult predators seeking to prey on them. Roblox is no exception and has become a popular target for pedophiles seeking to groom children,” Inman said at the time. “We’ve been engaging with Roblox on this issue for several months to make it clear to the platform that under Australian law they are required to take meaningful action to prioritize the protection of children.”

Discord has also faced scrutiny for allowing child sex predators, extremists, and terrorists who target children.

Some of the social media giants affected by Australia’s new law have blasted the government’s strategy. Meta argues that families, not the government, should “decide which apps teens can access.”

“To comply with Australia’s Social Media Minimum Age Law, teens under 16 will begin losing access to Facebook, Instagram, and Threads next month. While we’re committed to meeting our legal obligations, we’ve consistently raised concerns about this law,” a Meta spokesman told The Daily Wire. “Experts, youth groups, and many parents agree that blanket bans are not the solution—they isolate teens from online communities and information, while providing inconsistent protection across the many apps they use. There’s a better way: legislation that empowers parents to approve app downloads and verify age allows families—not the government—to decide which apps teens can access.”

Meta believes its “teen accounts,” which were introduced last year, are effective at keeping children safe online by putting parents in control and limiting who can contact children on social media.

Australia’s new law is already facing a legal challenge brought on behalf of two 15-year-old Australians who argue that the law robs them of their right to free speech, according to the BBC.

“We shouldn’t be silenced. It’s like Orwell’s book 1984, and that scares me,” said 15-year-old Macy Neyland.

Noah Jones, the other 15-year-old pushing back against the law, added, “We are the true digital natives and we want to remain educated, robust, and savvy in our digital world. … They should protect kids with safeguards, not silence.”

The Daily Wire reached out to the prime minister’s office for comment.

Following Australia’s move to ban some social media for kids, Malaysia introduced a similar ban. In the United States, Utah passed a law last year requiring social media platforms to verify a user’s age and obtain parental consent. Parts of the Utah law, however, have been temporarily blocked by a federal judge.

A new lawsuit aims to end the government’s practice of assuming that people of certain races are “socially disadvantaged” and entitled to special benefits.

The case was brought on behalf of Revier Technologies, an artificial intelligence company that was denied a “Small Business Credit Initiative” subsidy because its owner, Matthew Schultheis, is white, and Young America’s Foundation, a conservative group that said the interns in its college program were barred from a Department of Homeland Security fellowship that relied on SBA’s “disadvantaged” classification.

Agencies across the federal government rely on a decades-old Small Business Administration designation that, according to federal regulation, automatically applies to anyone of certain races.

“The federal government’s pervasive use of race as a proxy for determining who is ‘socially disadvantaged’ — and therefore who receives contracts, grants, loans, investment capital, opportunities, and other benefits — is unconstitutional, and it must be stopped,” the suit says.

The move comes as decades-old affirmative action programs are being ruled unconstitutional one by one. Center for Individual Rights attorney Mike Petrino told The Daily Wire that his suit targets a central regulation that is relied on by at least 20 different government programs. That is the SBA’s 8(a) designation, which takes its name from a 1953 law and is fleshed out in regulations, with no significant updates since 1998.

The longstanding government rule won’t pass constitutional muster under recent jurisprudence, including a landmark Supreme Court case on affirmative action at Harvard, the lawsuit argues.

Precedent requires that racial reparations be “narrowly tailored,” but the list of races given preference under SBA regulations is not based on any data about specific groups facing discrimination in specific industries, the suit said.

“As just some examples, Uyghur heritage from Kyrgyzstan is not presumed ‘socially disadvantaged,’ but Han Chinese heritage is. Pakistanis are in; Afghans are out. And because ‘Hispanic American’ includes anyone of Spanish origin, the lineal descendants of the conquistadors are presumed socially disadvantaged.”

Courts have held that race-based programs must also have a “logical end point.” SBA has never removed a minority group from its list and “does not have criteria to evaluate whether a group should be removed from this list because it is no longer suffering the present effects of past discrimination,” the suit said.

The November 17 lawsuit, filed in federal court in Louisiana, names as defendants SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler and Attorney General Pam Bondi. It could lead to a court ruling that would end racial giveaways in government — perhaps with a third-party group intervening to defend the practice–or to the Trump administration settling the lawsuit by changing federal rules. SBA spokeswoman Caitlin O’Dea did not return a request for comment.

The 8(a) language was written to implement a government-wide “minority contracting” program that “set aside” a percentage of all federal contracts, totaling tens of billions of dollars, for disadvantaged businesses. In 2020, Center for Individual Rights lawyers sued on behalf of a white-owned company that lost out on government contracts during the first Trump administration, alleging that the government’s tying race to “disadvantaged” status was illegal.

For decades, courts had made clear that directly race-based government programs were constitutional, and SBA claimed it skirted that issue by affording minorities only a “rebuttable presumption” that they were disadvantaged. In other words, minorities would have less paperwork to complete, but a process was still in place to ensure that, for example, the child of a Chinese billionaire wouldn’t be considered to have suffered discrimination in America.

The 2018 case exposed that this was false: A process to rebut the disadvantaged status didn’t even exist.

In July 2023, a judge issued a preliminary injunction forcing the SBA to change the way it chose which companies were “disadvantaged” for purposes of awarding government contracts. But the actual regulation was never changed, and other programs that piggybacked on it are still using it.

The Biden administration complied with the injunction by requiring potential 8(a) contractors to write victimhood essays describing how they had personally experienced discrimination in any aspect of life because of “racial, ethnic, or cultural bias within American society.”

The Department of Transportation also runs its own minority contracting program. The SBA and Transportation programs together likely make up the most lucrative race-based government programs in history. In 2021, 10% of all surface transportation money, more than $37 billion, was earmarked for “disadvantaged” companies.

But in September 2024, that program was also hit with a preliminary injunction amid claims that the program violates the Constitution’s equal protection clause, though it applied only to the companies that were parties in the case.

In May 2025, the Trump administration told a Kentucky judge it agreed that “the DBE program’s use of race- and sex-based presumptions of social and economic disadvantage … violates the equal protection component of the Due Process Clause.” Solicitor General D. John Sauer, who argues for the federal government before the Supreme Court, said he determined that his department would not defend the law.

In October 2025, the Trump administration’s transportation department enacted an interim final rule that “eliminates presumptive eligibility based on race or sex and requires applicants to submit individualized evidence of social disadvantage.”

Petrino, the lawyer suing SBA, said the young, white business owner he represents could be considered under such a process without having his race held against him. “Our client from Louisiana is from a humble background, he’s faced struggles in life, he’s socially disadvantaged.”

It is unclear how the government could objectively verify, rank, and evaluate such claims, and whether the essays will merely be a pretext that results in essentially the same outcome: Preference given to minorities who write that they are disadvantaged because of their race. SBA has not responded to questions about the essays.

The set-aside contracting scheme has led to corruption as those who secure an inside track to government contracts often morph into influence-peddlers who rent out that access to “partners” or subcontractors–non-disadvantaged firms who do much of the actual work. The ability of government officers to steer funds directly to specific companies, without competitive bidding, has also facilitated bribery.

Eliminating the existence of the set-aside programs, instead of just how they use race, would require an act of Congress, Petrino said. In the meantime, billions of dollars in government business are likely to be awarded based on essays written by business owners about their plight. The government already has a separate program reserving contracts for small businesses, the easiest and most objective way to ensure that someone is not privileged.

Last month, Loeffler, the SBA head, said a full review of the 8(a) program was underway, with an eye towards eliminating fraud. “For years, bureaucrats have turned a blind eye to rampant abuse within the contracting program for ‘socially and economically disadvantaged’ small businesses,” she wrote, referencing a Daily Wire story. “That ends now – as SBA works to complete its full-scale audit of the 8(a) Program.”