Sarah Henderson (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Communications and Digital Safety) Share this | Hansard source

Well, I say shame on the government. After more than 100 days of the social media ban being in place, it is very clear that this policy is not delivering as promised. Families were assured that this would be a practical and enforceable safeguard, yet what we have seen is confusion for parents, uncertainty for platforms and real questions about how this works in practice. We know this is not working. We know this is a ban riddled with defects. We know that the implementation of the ban was flawed from the very beginning. Yet the government has not been upfront about what is working and what isn't.

That starts with the really dubious claim made by the Prime Minister and the Minister for Communications that 4.7 million social media accounts have been deactivated, restricted or closed. This claim was made in January, and the Prime Minister claimed that 4.7 million accounts were shut down within days of the social media ban being put in place. This claim is now under investigation by the eSafety Commissioner because the numbers don't stack up. We know that 550,000 accounts have been closed by Meta, 415,000 by Snap and around 250,000 by TikTok. That is a long way short of 4.7 million accounts. This number should have been corrected by the Prime Minister or by the communications minister, but we have heard nothing but silence.

The coalition is determined that young Australians must be protected from harmful content online. This social media ban is not doing the job. The circumvention rates, based on my advice, are extremely high. I do take the point that the government has a bit of a whack-a-mole type of approach, where the government hasn't addressed a number of quite harmful platforms, because it doesn't seem to be concerned about what is actually online—the safety of material online, full stop.

As we've just heard from Senator Hanson-Young, there has been a decision just handed down in New Mexico which has found Meta liable for exposing children to harm on its platforms. So we've got the social media ban, but the government is missing in action when it comes to the safety of children online. These platforms demonstrably are causing harm, yet the government has not taken the appropriate action to address this. What is the government going to do now after this decision has been handed down? This is a damning decision on Meta. This demonstrates that the whole design of its platform is to keep children addicted. Doomscrolling is a massive issue. One of the most concerning elements in this case is the role of algorithms and the fact that these systems actively shape what young people see and who they are exposed to online. Australians deserve transparency, and platforms should not be allowed to operate black-box algorithms when children's safety is at stake.

Social media companies, the big tech platforms, must be held to a much higher standard, so I say to this hapless minister for communications: what is she doing to address the known harms on these platforms, including the damning decision that has just been handed down in the United States? Australians deserve to know. Young Australians deserve to know what the government is doing to fix the multiple number of defects with the social media ban, because currently as it stands this is simply not working, and young Australians are paying the price. (Time expired)