An Australian law firm has filed a class action in the Federal Court of Australia against Meta, claiming that Facebook and Instagram, through their “addictive design features and exposure to harmful content” harmed children.
The case, filed by MinterEllison on behalf of eight plaintiffs who say they were harmed by this while they were under 18, is seeking compensation. The case is funded by Litigation Lending Services.
It’s the “addictive design” claim that US courts and attorneys general have been using this year to force Meta to implement age checks for everyone – the remedy to the “problem” of “addiction” is to check the age of every user.
In the Australian case, the court issued a suppression order on Monday, October 19, preventing the publication of any information that could identify the plaintiffs and reveal the contents of the statement of claim.
Meta has told Reuters it would vigorously defend the claim.
Reuters writes that this might be the first lawsuit in Australia to try to hold social media platforms responsible for harm to their users.
MinterEllison partner David Taylor said, “The claims include allegations about Meta’s awareness of potential harm to children and its use of features designed to encourage engagement.”
Partner William Nolan added, “This proceeding raises important questions about the design and operation of social media platforms and their impact on children and teenagers in Australia.”
Litigation Lending Services chairman Shaun Bonétt said, “This class action is an important step towards ensuring that one of the world’s most powerful technology companies is held to account for conduct alleged to have caused widespread harm to children.”
The company’s chief investment officer Emma Colantonio said, “Without class actions and litigation funding, Australian families would have no practical means of pursuing these claims against a global technology giant.”
Meanwhile in the US, a jury in Los Angeles found in March that Meta and YouTube were negligent in the design of their platforms, and awarded a total of $6 million in damages to plaintiffs in the K.G.M. v. Meta case. The claim was built on how the platforms were designed, not on what users posted.
In that case, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg spent hours on the stand and at one point said that age checks should be done at the phone level, not by individual apps, saying, “Doing it at the level of the phone is just a lot cleaner than having every single app out there have to do this separately.”
In New Mexico, a jury in March ordered Meta to pay $375 million in civil penalties, and in August the judge in the case ordered the company to pay an additional $567 million into an abatement fund and to keep improving its “age assurance” models, and to build a model to predict whether a user is under 13.
That judge wrote that age verification “is the key to making Meta’s platforms safe for adolescents.”
In a multistate settlement announced on August 26, Meta will pay up to $16.68 billion over ten years, and apply “age assurance” to every Facebook and Instagram user in the settling states – both new and existing accounts.
In Australia, a ban on under-16s using social media has been in force since December 10, 2025, and platforms “must take reasonable steps to prevent age-restricted users having accounts.” Fines for non-compliance are now up to A$109.2 million.
Meta said it “removed access to more than 750,000 accounts on Facebook and Instagram in Australia” and uses AI to “analyze profiles – including posts, comments, bios and captions – for contextual clues that an account may belong to someone under 16.”
Meanwhile, Communications Minister Anika Wells said on October 20 that the eSafety Commissioner is preparing to take Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube to the Federal Court for not complying with the ban.
“The law is not failing – platforms are failing to comply with the law,” Wells said.
There is also a High Court challenge to the ban, brought by Reddit and the Digital Freedom Project, who say it imposes “intrusive and potentially insecure verification processes on adults as well as minors.” The hearing is due in November.
The government is also considering new rules that would allow users to switch off algorithmic recommendations in their feeds.
Do social media users really need to be protected from “addiction” – or is it simply a useful label to pin on a company to force it to introduce age verification? A study published in Scientific Reports found that while only 2 percent of Instagram users showed clinical signs of addiction risk, as many as 18 percent said they felt addicted.
However, the study also said that “the addiction label does not empower users to regain control over their use.”
The details of the Australian lawsuit against Meta may be sealed, but the theory behind it is not new: call a feed an addiction, and the “solution” is to check the age of everyone using it.
In the US, each of the cases this year that have used this argument has resulted in some form of age verification being ordered or agreed to by Meta. Australia already has a law that requires age checks for under-16s, and is about to sue the platforms for not enforcing it properly.
A court win in the case of the “addictive design” would give the next round of age checks a legal precedent to rely on. And once again, it would be the adults, who were not party to the lawsuit, who would have to prove their age.
