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Further implications
At this point much remains uncertain about the impact of Australia's ban on social media access for those under 16.It is immediately unlikely that the ban will not be imposed as it has the support of all state governments and the federal Opposition This means that even if the Albanese government is defeated in the election to be held in the first half of 2025, the Liberal Coalition has promised to continue with the implementation of the ban. However, i is now unlikely to become operational until a month or two into 2026 as it was announced in December 2024 that the ban would be applied after 14 months, not a year as originally intended.
As the first time such a ban has been imposed, it is both a technological and social experiment. What technology will be recommended to the social media platforms for age verification has not been decided yet. The Australian government has set up an Age Assurance Technology Trial. The trial is reviewing age verification, estimation and inference technologies. These technologies will be considered as options to prevent access to online pornography by children and young people under the age of 18, and age-limit access to social media platforms for those under 16 years of age. The results are expected in June 2025.
Once the trial is over, the results will be referred to the social media platforms with government preferences indicated. How the platforms then attempt to apply these tools will probably not begin to become apparent until the second half of 2026.There will be many in the community keenly observing the impact these bans are appearing to be having. Researchers will be examining the extent to which children and adolescents appear to be circumventing the ban. There will also be intensive investigation of whether the bans are bringing benefits or harms in the areas of young people's mental health, social development and wellbeing and academic attainment. The community at large will be vitally interested in the impact that the age verification processes chosen has on user privacy. There is also likely be careful monitoring of increased evidence of identity theft and related offences.
Australia's Social Media Minimum Age Act 2024 is part of a suite of measures intended to protect all Australian citizens from online harm. Australia's Online Safety Act includes basic online safety expectations for all providers of internet material. These include ensuring all end-users can use online services in a safe manner. They also include that the best interests of the child are a primary consideration in the design and operation of services likely to be used by children and that the provision of unlawful and harmful material is minimised. They further require providers to facilitate user complaints about unlawful and harmful material and activity and to review and respond to these complaints.
Industry codes are being developed by industry associations to prevent children and young people under 18 from accessing or being exposed to age-inappropriate material such as pornography, across many different types of online services. These codes must provide appropriate community safeguards before the eSafety Commissioner will register them. Codes are required to be submitted to eSafety for consideration by 28 February 2025. More legislation is in the pipeline. A re-elected Albanese government will be likely to proceed with a Digital Duty of Care Bill. If passed into law, Digital Duty of Care would place the responsibility on digital platforms to proactively keep Australians safe and better prevent online harms. The duty of care model was a key recommendation of the independent statutory review of Australia's Online Safety Act 2021.
Another piece of legislation that a second term Albanese government might revisit is a Misinformation Act. On November 24, 2024, the Australian government withdrew a bill that would give a media watchdog power to monitor digital platforms and require them to keep records about misinformation and disinformation on their networks. The Government had not been able to get the support of other parties to pass the bill which the Opposition condemned as 'censorship laws in Australia'.
The bill attracted both support and opposition from diverse groups within the community and would need to be substantially reworked before it could be put before Parliament again.
One of the major questions hanging over all these measures being put in place by the Albanese Government to protect Australians online is will they be accepted by users and the big tech companies. Currently, the Social Media Minimum Age Act 2024 appears to have widespread popular support among the adult population. Whether the tech companies seek to undermine it remains to be seen. Elon Musk, the owner of social media platform X (formerly Twitter) termed Australia's failed online misinformation bill 'fascist'.
On January 7, 2025, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive officer of Meta, announced that his company would get rid of its US factcheckers on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. This is being interpreted as a bid to encourage user engagement. Social media columnist William Antonelli claimed, 'Studies show that false social media posts spread up to 20 times faster than true ones.' Zuckerberg's action does not suggest a readiness to put further user protections in place on his platforms. It also raises doubts about the number of users who actually want them.