X has a new argument against sweeping underage social media bans that would limit usage of its platform: They interfere with international law.
The social media platform, which sits within Elon Musk’s SpaceX, issued a submission to the Australian parliament published Tuesday that called for the government to drop efforts to strengthen its underage social media ban. It complained that the proposals to increase pressure on sites to demonstrate efforts to crack down on underage access are unnecessary, ill-suited, unfair, and could violate privacy rights.
X pushed back against the “highly invasive” information gathering powers the proposed amendment would allow, accusing the commissioner of having “seemingly no understanding” of how this would work for the platforms and no safeguards for confidential and commercially sensitive information. Demanding data, documents, and compliance evidence from non-Australians in other countries could cause issues “for the comity of nations,” the firm also warned.
Australia is leading a growing global movement to restrict children’s access to social media, after banning under-16-year-olds from the sites in December. In May, the country ordered X to pay a $463,000 fine for failing to comply with child safety measures. The country’s internet regulator, eSafety, first issued the fine in 2023, claiming X did not respond sufficiently to a request for information on how it was tackling the spread of online child sexual abuse content, submitted one month before Elon Musk took over Twitter, now X.
X has previously criticized the country’s “excessive” penalty regime and complained in the most recent submission that a proposal to increase penalties against individuals is “entirely unjustified and disproportionate.”
Musk has been a particularly vocal critic of Australia’s bill to make 16 the minimum age for social media. “Seems like a backdoor way to control access to the Internet by all Australians,” he wrote on X when the legislation was announced in late 2024. When Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez announced similar measures in February of this year, Musk called him a “tyrant” and “true fascist totalitarian.”
While many digital rights campaigners believe blanket age bans on social media are “problematic,” the information-gathering powers are not the issue, says Stefania Di Stefano, a researcher in international law and technologies.
“For me, the complete ban from social media on children and minors is problematic from an international human rights perspective,” says Di Stefano. “It is disproportionate with respect to the right of children to exercise their right to freedom of expression, their right to access information, their right to association, and so on and so forth.”
But Julia Hörnle, a professor of internet law at Queen Mary University of London, is skeptical about X’s submission. “A regulator in Australia ordering X to disclose a document in relation to their business activities in Australia, that’s perfectly fine,” she tells WIRED. “From all the data in the possession of the social media company, they can distinguish between Australian and non-Australian children, and therefore keep regulation to Australia.”