Elon Musk’s X has told Australia that its plan to tighten enforcement of a world-first ban on under-16s using social media would breach international law.
The company has trained its objection on a bill that would let the country’s online-safety regulator demand documents from people who live nowhere near Australia.
The complaint, reported by Reuters, arrives as Canberra prepares to put real force behind a law that is already on the books.
The ban took effect last December, and ministers now want to double the maximum fine and give the eSafety Commissioner sharper powers to gather evidence.
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The law makes platforms, not parents or children, responsible for keeping the youngest users out. It covers the big social networks, X among them, and threatens penalties for any company that fails to take “reasonable steps” to verify a user’s age.
X’s argument is narrow but pointed. In a submission on the draft law, it said the amendments would “compel any person outside Australia to provide information and documents merely because they are affiliated with a company,” something it called in clear conflict with international law.
The company went further on the principle at stake. It warned of a “severe impact on international comity,” the convention by which one country’s courts defer to another’s, while Musk described the ban as a “backdoor way to control access to the internet by all Australians.”
The money is not trivial. Under the proposed changes the maximum penalty would climb to A$99 million, roughly $69 million, for platforms that fail to keep under-16s off their services.
The government’s case is about harm. Ministers have framed the ban as a response to the toll of social media on children’s wellbeing, and they argue that only the platforms, with their data and their engineers, can enforce an age limit at any scale.
Those platforms are already being watched closely. The eSafety Commissioner has said it is preparing a possible enforcement lawsuit against five services, and Australia has separately said that Meta, TikTok, and YouTube are not complying with the rules.
Enforcement, though, keeps running into the same problem. Surveys taken around the rollout suggest most Australians under 16 still hold accounts, and early trials found that the age checks meant to catch them stumbled at the first hurdle.
X is not a neutral bystander, and this is not its first quarrel with Australia’s regulator. The platform has previously fought eSafety orders to take down violent content, and it now sits as both a covered platform under the ban and its loudest critic.
For all its objections, X has said it intends to comply with the ban itself. Its fight is with the enforcement bill, and specifically with the reach that bill would give a regulator over people and documents beyond Australian soil.
The dispute has also crossed the Pacific. A US congressional committee has asked the eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, to testify, accusing her of imperilling Americans’ free speech, a framing that sits comfortably alongside X’s own.
The wider audience is governmental. Britain is weighing its own under-16 restrictions, and other capitals are watching Australia to see whether a national age limit can be enforced at all, or whether it buckles under the platforms it is aimed at.
What began as a question about children has become a question about jurisdiction. X’s position is that Australia’s authority stops at its border, and that a regulator in Canberra should not be able to post demands to an office in California.
Canberra’s view is the opposite, and the bill is its way of saying so. The coming months will decide whose reading of international law holds, and whether the world’s first under-16 ban can be made to mean anything at the point where it is enforced.
