Maria Kovacic (NSW, Liberal Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today in support of the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024. I want to make one thing abundantly clear from the outset: the coalition has always been firmly opposed to the implementation of a mandatory digital ID. There is rightfully widespread concern in the community about the security of personal data. With data breaches and leaks from major corporations dominating the news, it's entirely understandable that Australians are worried about the safety of their private information. Beyond the issues of data security, there is a much bigger concern at the heart of this debate—the growing danger that social media poses for our children. When it comes to the tech giants, platforms like Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok, it's clear these megacorporations have shown time and time again that they have not prioritised our children's safety.

I echo the very real concerns of many who reached out to me on this matter, and I want to be clear that I don't support any system, including a digital ID, that compromises the privacy and security of Australians. Such things should always be voluntary. Thanks to the efforts of the coalition, the bill includes crucial safeguards that prevent social media companies from forcing anyone to hand over sensitive personal information or documentation. This bill is not about restricting individual freedoms or lecturing parents on how to raise their children. It's about giving parents the tools and support they need to protect their kids from the very real dangers that are online.

The core focus of this legislation is simple. It demands that social media companies take reasonable steps to identify and remove under-age users from their platforms. This is a responsibility these companies should have been fulfilling long ago, but, for too long, they have shirked these responsibilities in favour of profit. This is not a radical concept. It's a necessary one. Similar provisions are already in place in places like Florida, Utah and Louisiana, where social media companies are required to take reasonable steps to verify the ages of their users. These steps are overseen by regulators, ensuring that companies are held accountable for their actions. Under this legislation, failure to comply could result in fines of up to $50 million.

Let's be clear that these companies have the capability to act. They can deploy their vast resources when they choose to do so. Take TikTok, for example. In 2023, TikTok removed 76 million under-age accounts globally, including one million right here in Australia. They did that of their own accord, and it wasn't too difficult, too complex, too hard or anything like that. They just did it. They did this also without requiring digital IDs or any sensitive personal documentation. Instead, they used technology they already had. They used technology that they already used—the same technology that they can use to customise feeds and algorithms, which they do every single day. They use it to identify under-age users. If TikTok can do this, so can other tech giants, like Meta, which is valued at some $2 trillion.

Imagine if there were a financial incentive to identify under-age accounts. I expect we wouldn't have to wait too long to see some outcomes in that regard. Mark Zuckerberg and his billionaire peers have repeatedly demonstrated that they care more about money than they do about the safety and the mental health of our children. They have the ability to do this without compromising or changing any mechanisms of privacy that people do not already hand over voluntarily when they open their own accounts. This bill takes a big-stick approach. It's the only way to get their attention and force them to make the changes that are so desperately needed. We must hold them to account, and this legislation does just that.

Social media and the digital world are an ever-evolving tech behemoth, and it's long overdue for our laws to evolve with it. Ask any millennial what their online experiences were like 10 years ago and, compared to now, you'll see a massive shift. And it's not a good shift; it's not a positive one. Social media platforms for young people were once dominated by dedicated safe spaces for children—sites like Club Penguin—where families felt confident that their kids were protected, but today that landscape has changed dramatically. Studies show that just a single exposure to extremist, racist, misogynistic or violent content can trigger algorithms that push even more harmful content to the viewer. With just one view, it can become part of your standard feed. A child just needs to happen upon it once and it will keep coming. We aren't talking about websites on the dark web. We aren't talking about obscure blogs in the depths of the internet. We are talking about content that is littered across TikTok, Instagram and Facebook. TikTok was deliberately designed to be addictive. Think about that for a moment. Do we really want 13-year-old children being exposed to this kind of platform and content, where its purpose is to be addictive to our children? This should be unfathomable, yet here we are.

The protection of children from the toxic elements of social media and the online space is one of the most urgent issues of our time. This is not about telling parents how to care for their children. Parents are already doing everything they can, but social media is one of the biggest problems discussed among parents across our country. I've spoken to countless parents who are literally crying out for help, telling me they need action to protect their children from the risks online. Polling from YouGov shows that 77 per cent of parents support measures to safeguard children from the harmful effects of social media. Parents know the dangers these platforms pose for their children, and they want us to help them take action. They want us to help them protect their children.

The data tells a harrowing story. The mental health of Australian children, especially girls, has deteriorated at an alarming rate over the past decade. Hospitalisations for self-harm among girls aged 10 to 14 have increased by over 300 per cent in that time. Young boys are targeted by sexual predators, with the AFP reporting hundreds of incidents this year alone, and those are the incidents that are reported. What about those that go unreported, where the parents are unaware of the grooming and attempted grooming of their children? There need to be mechanisms in place to minimise this as much as humanly possible.

We had a hearing on Monday, albeit it a brief one, in relation to this matter, and I was deeply disturbed by some of the comments from one of the witnesses, who suggested that there was an exaggeration as to harms found online. I don't think there's an exaggeration. I think it's very real, and I think it's incredibly problematic. If we continue to pretend that it's not happening, it will continue to get worse and worse unchecked. We have a responsibility and an accountability to protect these children. I read an article recently which talked about the challenge of putting this genie back into the bottle. We can't walk away from this just because it's hard. We can't walk away from it just because it's uncomfortable, and we can't walk away from it just because some of the kids won't like it. That's a reality. It's a shift and it's a change in what we have said is acceptable. But what we are saying here today is that we do not think it's acceptable for our children to be exposed to harms and predators online or for that to continue to occur under our watch.

These statistics should be a wake-up call for all of us. Social media, which we look to to connect us, is instead contributing to a growing crisis in our children's mental health. We cannot point to the issue of a loss of some of that connection as the reason to cling onto it in the face of the damage being done to our children. It is not a zero-sum game.

This is not just about the harmful content. Kids face pressure, bullying and unrealistic beauty standards. They think that everything that they see there is how things should be. We all know, as adults, that what we see on social media is not necessarily real. Most of us had the opportunity to grow up without it forming our opinions. We owe that same ability to have a childhood to our own children, and we need to stop the toxic culture of comparison that these platforms offer and foster.

This bill seeks to address these issues head on and protect our children from the negative effects of social media. This legislation represents a major step forward in protecting the privacy and wellbeing of Australian families. The coalition has worked to ensure that this bill includes critical privacy protections to ensure that no platform can force users to provide sensitive personal information, such as digital IDs, drivers licences or passports. This is not about surveillance. It's about protecting our children in a world that is increasingly digital.

I also want to highlight that, while this legislation shapes an important step forward, it should be just the beginning. We must take further action to address another critical issue that is damaging the wellbeing of young people: the toxic prevalence and normalisation of pornography and its continued availability in the lives of children and adolescents. A study conducted this year by the Queensland University of Technology revealed a stark and disturbing reality. Pornography is playing a significant role in shaping young people's sexual understandings, expectations and experiences. Even more troubling is the finding that children as young as eight, nine and 10 are being exposed to this harmful content online. We cannot hide from this and pretend it's somebody else's problem. It's our problem. This is insidious and damaging and cannot be ignored. The impact of early exposure to pornography is profound, distorting young minds and contributing to unrealistic and unhealthy views of relationships. We must extend our efforts to help parents protect their children from this dangerous content that they are too often exposed to and take steps to limit the availability and accessibility of pornography to children.

We need stronger laws and more comprehensive measures to tackle all of these issues head on and to ensure that we are doing everything in our power to safeguard the mental and emotional wellbeing of the next generation. This is a fight that we cannot walk away from. This is a necessary and meaningful step towards ensuring the safety of our children online. This bill will force big tech companies to take responsibility for the products and the services that they provide and make a lot of money out of, prioritising the wellbeing of young Australians over their commercial agendas and their profits. With this legislation, we can make a real, lasting difference in protecting the next generation. This is a pivotal moment in our country. We have drawn a line in the sand. The enormous power of big tech can no longer remain unchecked in Australia.

David Fawcett (SA, Liberal Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Henderson is next on my list, but we'll rotate the call as per standing order 186. Senator Hanson-Young.

Sarah Hanson-Young (SA, Australian Greens) | Link to this | Hansard source

I'm glad for standing order 186! I rise in relation to this piece of legislation, the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024. Firstly, let me say what a disgrace it is that this bill, only tabled in the House of Representatives last Thursday, has been railroaded and rushed through the process here across the parliament. It was tabled in the House Thursday, sent to a Senate inquiry that sat for only three hours on Monday. Submissions from stakeholders and interested parties were open for less than 24 hours on Friday—talk about putting out the bins, taking out the rubbish! That's exactly how this whole bill has been treated by the major parties. The reason that this bill is being rushed without scrutiny and without appropriate review is both the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Dutton, and the Prime Minister are worried that if people really knew about what the consequences of this piece of legislation meant, they wouldn't support it.

Mr Dutton is desperate. Despite all the hoo-hah and the flurry we've had in here this morning about rushing pieces through and guillotining bills through this place, this is the one piece of legislation that the Liberals and the National Party want rammed through this place this week. This is the one thing, and every Australian voter and every Liberal Party and National Party voter should hear this: the one priority the Liberal Party have this week is to smash this piece of legislation through without review. Why? Because Mr Dutton doesn't want people to notice. Mr Dutton does not want people to notice, despite the huge concern, the wheels falling off on his own side, and the fact he can't keep his own people in the tent. He wants it rammed through at a minute to midnight, Christmas Eve, the last day of the parliamentary year because he doesn't want people to notice. This is the bloke who talks tough. This is the bloke who says, 'I will be tough on this and I will be tough on this and I will say what's needs to be said.' He is hiding. He is hiding on this bill and he is rushing it through and he doesn't want people to notice. What a load of gutlessness from the Leader of the Opposition.

Of course, this suits the government of the day as well because, despite expert after expert after expert, this bill will not keep children or young people safe—it won't. I understand the best endeavours and intentions of people in this place and around the country who want to make social media safer for our children and our young people. We need to make social media safer for everybody—for women, for people of colour, for those who are isolated, for older Australians who feel totally unable to engage and understand how quickly this technology has happened. We know it's senior Australians who are continually duped and tricked and targeted by scammers on social media. They need protection, too. Young and old Australians need to be able to know—have the right to know—that when they log on to Facebook or open up YouTube or participate in sharing their playlist on Spotify that the platform is safe. We wouldn't expect that the rules of safety, respect or civil discourse are out the window in the car park at Coles. We don't think that just because something happens in the car park at Coles rather than the car park at Woolworths there is a different set of rules and standards and laws to be enforced, but here we have a situation where online and in social media it's a free-for-all. We do need to do something about making these platforms safer. For far too long, the big tech companies have hoodwinked governments and bureaucrats, have set their own rules and have made massive profits off self-regulating or not regulating themselves, and it's time that that was reined in. But that's not what this bill does.

This bill is a false sense of security. It gives the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition a fig leaf to say that they understand and care about parents' concerns about children and young people online, but they're trying to fool Australian parents. They're trying to look like they're doing something while actually doing not much at all. I think this is really dangerous. I think giving Australian parents a false sense of security is actually going to make things more harmful for our young people online, more harmful for women on social media and more dangerous for our young people and teenagers, who are already dealing with so many issues in this world. This is a bill that is an example of the emperor with no clothes. Peter Dutton and Anthony Albanese, as the leaders of the two major parties, who want to rush this through without scrutiny, are standing there, side by side, naked. They are emperors with no clothes, and they want people to be fooled.

We actually need a serious debate about what we need to do to make these platforms genuinely safer so that young people aren't exploited, targeted and harassed and that they're not in danger of harassment or distress. That's not what this bill does. If this government really cared about making these platforms safer, you wouldn't be rushing this. You would be putting a duty of care on these platforms to make them responsible for ensuring they have a legal requirement and responsibility to protect their customers, the users and everyday people. Instead, this bill lets the big tech companies off the hook by pretending that young people can just be banned from the internet. It's fool's gold and it's dangerous.

Tech experts, mental health experts and youth advocates are all saying that, if we do this, the result will be twofold. Firstly, young people will get around it, or they will find their way onto platforms on the dark web which are far more insidious, much more dangerous and much harder for parents and, frankly, legal enforcement to keep an eye on what is going on. Secondly, for those that have been able to circumvent the rules and get themselves online, the tech companies have no obligation and no requirement to make sure that, if you get through the cracks, if you get online as a young person, you'll be kept safe. They'll be pushed into the darkest parts of the web and they won't want to tell their parents what's going on because they'll be worried their phone will be taken away, so they will spiral further and further into isolation from their friends, their family, medical experts who may be able to help them, school counsellors and teachers. They'll become even more isolated and vulnerable. Or, if they're smart enough, like most kids around the age of 14 or 15, they'll work out a way to crack the code to get onto Instagram or TikTok to set themselves up on a social media platform with the false premise that it's only for adults—so they're going to be swimming around on a platform that has no obligation to keep, or concern for keeping, children and young people safe.

This is a disaster unfolding before our eyes. You couldn't make this stuff up. The Prime Minister says he's worried about social media. The Leader of the Opposition says, 'Let's ban it.' It's a race to the bottom to try and pretend who can be the toughest, and all they end up doing is pushing young people into further isolation and giving the platforms the opportunity to continue the free-for-all because there's no social responsibility required.

There have been some promises made around regulating the platforms to make them safer and more responsible, and to stop them from profiteering off harmful content—but none of that is in this bill. The social media ban is the emperor with no clothes. It is fool's gold. It's pretend. It's like going to The Reject Shop, purchasing the dodgy floaties, putting them on your kids and saying, 'There you go, kids; jump in the deep end and see how you float.' No parent would responsibly do that, and the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition shouldn't make them do it.

This bill is rubbish. I'm angry about it because it doesn't meet the very serious needs of the very real concerns parents have. It's pretend. The Prime Minister and Peter Dutton are pretending to deal with a very, very serious issue. There's a reason they didn't want this to go through a proper Senate inquiry. There is a reason they don't want people talking about it. There's a reason this is being done at the last minute in this parliamentary session, and it's that they know it's a bad piece of legislation and that it won't do what they say it will do, but they don't want people to know about it. Trying to fool the Australian population into thinking they are doing this in the interests of children is abhorrent. They're not; they're doing it in their own political interests. This is a political fix, not a social media fix. The ban is rubbish.

I move the Greens' second reading amendment:

At the end of the motion, add ", but the Senate notes that:

(a) the Joint Select Committee on Social Media and Australian Society heard from experts that banning young people from social media will not make platforms safer for anyone, and instead recommended tougher action on platforms, including a legislated duty of care; and

(b) the attempt by Labor and the Liberals to ram this ban through without genuine scrutiny in under a week is rushed, reckless and ignores expert evidence".

Sarah Henderson (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Education) | Link to this | Hansard source

The coalition will be supporting the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024, following its passage through the House yesterday.

I'm pleased to say that the coalition has worked to strengthen the provisions of this bill. These are important changes which in our view have significantly strengthened the planned legislation in at least two areas—firstly, in relation to privacy. There will be new provisions stating that people cannot be compelled to provide digital ID or government issued identity documents such as drivers licences or passports, under this legislation. We are pleased to see this supported in the recommendations of the Senate inquiry. Secondly, following our negotiations with the government, changes will be made so that the communications minister will be able to make rules specifying information which, in order to comply with the legislation, social media platforms are not able to collect. This will enable the minister to make rules to ensure that guidelines issued under the legislation are appropriate and proportionate to the objectives of the law. These are both significant changes which materially strengthen the bill.

It is important to get this bill right and that we pass it into law because there are parents across Australia who are looking to us to take action now on the scourge that is social media, which is harming our young people. It deals with an issue on which the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Dutton, has once again led the national debate. In June, Mr Dutton committed to implementing an age limit of 16. He announced that a coalition government would raise the age of social media access to 16 and said it would be at the top of his priority list for his first 100 days in office. Five months later, the Prime Minister has come on board with legislation which the coalition has sought to strengthen, and I will have more to say on that shortly.

This debate is the latest policy lead from the coalition regarding online safety. We have been driving action on age verification, particularly in the last year, since the road map for age verification was made public. We announced plans for a trial of technologies in November last year, including $6.7 million in funding, a figure almost identical to the number the government are now using for their trial. It comes, of course, after the coalition, as I say, led this debate. In the same month, we introduced legislation for the trial to occur. This builds on the fact that it was a coalition government which established the world-leading Online Safety Act. And so, a year after we sought to legislate action to strengthen efforts for online safety, here we are, debating this bill.

We are glad the government is now on board, and we are genuinely supportive of this bill, which seeks to protect Australian teenagers from the harms and tragedies linked to social media. This is a totemic issue for Australian families, and it is well past time that action was taken. We are debating a bill which provides a vital reform designed to help young Australians and their families for generations to come.

We come to this parliament to help people in our communities across this nation. That is our task, and this bill seeks to achieve that. Not only will it provide protections for our young but, importantly, it will also arm parents with laws which will help them set rules at home with their kids. For the mums and dads of Australia, that's a really important principle here. It's helping them to set protective boundaries for their children, opening up family discussions about the importance of online safety and helping parents to get more involved in what is a really important issue for families. There is clear community support for these measures. Parents are telling us this, and that's reinforced by a new poll from YouGov which has shown that 77 per cent of Australians back the under-16 social media ban.

Let me speak to the bill. It is, of course, designed to set the age limit of 16 for young people to hold a social media account. This is aimed at reducing the harms that social media is causing to young people. The bill provides for a new, broader definition of social media companies: 'age-restricted social media platforms'. This will now capture Snapchat, as well as other major social media platforms such as TikTok, Facebook, Reddit, Instagram and X. There will be a rule-making power for the minister to exclude specific classes of services from the definition. This would carve out messaging services, online games and services which support the health and education of users, which would include YouTube, as well as WhatsApp, Messenger Kids, ReachOut's PeerChat and Google Classroom. It requires relevant social media companies to take reasonable steps to prevent age restricted users from having an account with the social media platform.

As I mentioned earlier, privacy issues are of the utmost importance to us in the coalition, and we have worked extremely hard to strengthen this legislation. The bill prohibits platforms from using information collected for age-assurance purposes for any other purpose unless explicitly agreed by the individual. Once information has been used for age assurance it must be destroyed unless the individual agrees to it being retained. Failure to delete information constitutes a breach of the Privacy Act and will attract significant penalties. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner will also provide oversight of the privacy provisions related to this bill.

Driving the need for these laws is the knowledge of widespread concern and evidence about the severe mental health impact of social media on children. We have seen disturbing global trends in youth mental health since the rise of social media, especially for girls. According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, there was a more than three-fold increase in the rate of intentional self-harm hospitalisations for girls under 14 from 2008-09 through to 2022-23. In recent years there have been large increases in the rate of mental health issues amongst children and young people. A 2022 independent report on self-harm commissioned by Australia's Therapeutic Goods Administration noted that there have been 'very large increases in all intentional self-poisonings in older children and adolescents, aged 10 to 19, worldwide over the recent decade'.

Leading psychologist Dr Simon Wilksch, a strong supporter of setting an age limit for social media, said:

… a 200% increase in 10 to 14-year-olds experiencing an eating disorder over the last 12 years strongly overlaps with the rapid growth in social media use by children …

Clinical psychologist Dr Danielle Einstein told the Senate inquiry into this bill that any benefits of social media to mental health are far outweighed by the disadvantages. She said:

I do not see any benefits for mental health in social media. I've looked really hard at the evidence. Even if there were to be some, I think they are far outweighed by the disadvantages. For mental health, I do not see any benefits.

We also recall that it was the US Surgeon General who made the important point:

The mental health crisis among young people is an emergency—and social media has emerged as an important contributor.

We simply cannot ignore such evidence.

The harm being caused to young Australians has also been demonstrated in the tragic cases which we have seen in News Corp's Let Them Be Kids coverage—families torn apart after their children fell foul to social media. I also pay credit to the work of the 36 Months group, which has secured nearly 128,000 signatures from people urging the age limit to be raised to 16. In recent weeks and months we have seen, here in this building, a number of the parents of children who have died after falling foul of social media. Some have been carrying the ashes of their dead daughters or sons. They have told terrible, tragic stories, their lives and families torn apart by social media. We must honour them and the memories of their children. We owe it to our communities to get this done and not to be distracted by those often well-meaning people who may say this is too hard or that the kid will get around this. We support the legislation and highlight the work of the coalition to strengthen this legislation, particularly in relation to privacy, which we have strongly argued is extremely important.

I support this bill because it is the right thing to do. We should not delay. We should get this important reform done right now.

Dave Sharma (NSW, Liberal Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

Let me commence by saying that I share the concerns of some of my colleagues that the process for considering this bill, the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024, has been suboptimal, to say the least, with the amount of time provided for experts and interested parties to make submissions, and the amount of time for the Senate committee to consider this legislation and, indeed, the lack of supporting evidence that we've been able to marshal. I would have to point the finger at the government. This is something that the opposition has been calling on for some time. The testing of age-verification technology and the trial is something that the eSafety Commissioner first proposed at least two years ago, and the opposition encouraged the government to move expeditiously with it. If that trial had commenced when it should have and had concluded by now, we would be having a more informed discussion about some of the technological solutions available.

In short, I would have liked more time, and I think the Senate and our processes deserved more time to consider this. At the same time, I'm not someone who likes to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and I recognise that, in the words of Bismark, the making of legislation is often like the making of sausages; it can be ugly and particularly indecorous at times, but it's how things get done. I recognise there is an opportunity in this parliament at this time to pass this legislation, even with the deficiencies of process, and I don't believe it is an opportunity we should let slip.

I approached this issue, as I do any issue of government regulation and intervention into the private lives of individuals—particularly households and parents—as a sceptic needing to be convinced of the argument for why government should be able to limit the freedom of children, in this instance, and in some respects remove or curtail the rights of parents and their own decisions about how they raise their children. I respect the views of my colleagues here and elsewhere who have made those points. To counter that, I would make two fundamental propositions. Firstly, in my reading of the evidence that is available, the evidence of harm is quite overwhelming and the evidence of benefit is quite limited. But I would also say that protecting children from harm is a conservative proposition. It's about helping preserve families and protecting people who are vulnerable, whose capacities and abilities have not reached the age of maturity. It's a different proposition than interfering in the lives, freedoms and choices of fully formed, consenting adults, and we recognise this in a number of ways. Children do not have the same rights as adults, and in this vertical I think the case is equally well made.

I believe that the evidence that unregulated access to social media is harming children is overwhelming. If you've read Jonathan Haidt's book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, the evidence is well marshalled in that book and I think it has a strong empirical basis. This harm seems to be especially pronounced amongst girls—not only amongst girls but predominantly amongst girls. This doesn't mean every child who uses social media is likely to encounter harm; in fact, overwhelmingly, they're not. This is about quite a small but significant enough minority. The harm can go to the more extreme ends: ostracisation leading to bullying leading to self-harm and, in the most tragic cases, suicide; the development of obsessive characteristics; and the development of eating disorders. Those individual instances have been well documented, including here in Australia. Doubtless social media wasn't the sole cause of that—it was only a contributing factor—but it was nonetheless an important contributing factor.

Even those children who do not suffer such harms—and I recognise that is the overwhelming majority of such users—still face some of the more benign consequences such as attention fragmentation, addiction, social deprivation, distraction, irritability, obsessive behaviour and often just the opportunity cost of spending a large amount of time on social media, which means you're not spending time with your family, you're not spending time with your friends, you're not doing exercise, you're not doing your homework, you're not reading a book and you're not getting proper sleep. This is because these social media platforms play on and lean into ingrained human characteristics and evolutionary habits we've developed over a number of years to, effectively, get us hooked. They play on our desire for new information and new input; that's a trait we developed as a species that has always had to concern itself with imminent threats to its survival and which meant we always prioritised new and incoming information and were hypersensitive to it because of our alertness to changes to our environment—that's the dopamine release cycle.

To social comparison: being social animals means that humans spend a lot of time managing relations and trying to navigate the hierarchy of social relations, and social media plays into our desire for affirmation, for friendship, for social status and for social competition in many respects. In some respects, social media exacerbates some of these traits. A well-known phenomenon of audience capture is where a social media persona leans into those characteristics in their digital life, which reflects, in their regular life, those characteristics that seem to generate the most attention or likes or affirmation, which can send people down quite a diverting trajectory. Prestige bias is where people look at who is successful in social media terms—who has the most followers and the most likes and seems to drive the most engagement? They model themselves on those sorts of behaviours. Often, as we all know, the people who seem to do well in social media are often provocateurs, are often outlandish and often embrace extreme attributes—and, indeed, they're encouraged to do so by the way people build an audience on social media.

There are some benefits to children using social media; I don't discount that. It's a way for them to stay in touch and stay connected. We all saw this during the COVID pandemic when our children weren't going to school and stayed in touch through messaging platforms and social media platforms. It allows them to build and maintain a social circle. I also appreciate that for people who are isolated, geographically or socially or otherwise, it provides them a way to build a community which might not be available to them in the real world. But I say the benefits of children using social media overwhelmingly accrue to the digital platforms. This is why they are so interested in maintaining the status quo—because they monetise the children's audience, and they're able to sell that to advertisers. The committee heard evidence that about US$11 billion was accruing to digital platforms in advertising revenue from that market alone from the under-18 audience alone. This is a valuable audience. We know this from children's television. Advertisers like capturing the attention of children. If a social media platform can say that it commands so many hours a day of a child's time, that is a valuable commodity they can then on sell. That is where I believe the benefits overwhelmingly accrue.

Lastly, parents need help with this. That is why I think there is a case for government intervention. That's partly because parents have to grapple with the ubiquity of phones and electronic devices and the crude measure of taking away their kids' phones or giving them a non-smart phone without any of these apps. I don't think that's particularly realistic. In today's era, we expect our children to be able to be contacted and contactable. That is especially true in many households today where both parents work and are not at home when the children are home or are coming home from school. There's also the sheer ingenuity and cleverness of children. Many parents would know this. Children are ingenious at getting around any technical blocks you might seek to fix. You hear stories of parents saying, 'Make sure you delete all these apps,' and the children download them again and label them as something else. The parents don't know, and they create new identities or user IDs.

Overwhelmingly, the main area in which parents need help is the problem of collective action. It has to be a brave parent or a particularly self-assured or confident parent that will say, 'All my children's friends and all of his or her social group are on a platform and using it to connect, but I'm going to take my child off.' They don't want to punish their child. They don't want to risk ostracisation. Indeed, there are documented cases of having their devices taken and then self-harming because they're so concerned about the catastrophic effect that will have on their social status. If there's a situation where it is normalised that children under 16 are not on social media all the time, and it is normalised that they socialise in more traditional ways, then parents will feel more comfortable in leaning into that legislative norm.

There are some legitimate concerns around this piece of legislation. Some of my colleagues across this chamber have expressed these concerns, and some of them will. Firstly, this will be imperfect. I don't doubt it will be. It's new legislation that hasn't been robustly tested. It is used in some jurisdictions around the world, but it has not been widely tried or used. Children will probably find workarounds to it. They will potentially use VPNs. They will find a way to fake their identity or fake their age. They will migrate to other platforms. I don't doubt that's true, but this is about introducing some friction into the process. We recognise this in lots of spheres of life where government seeks to regulate. Even as a homeowner, you'd never expect that your home wouldn't be broken into but you'd still put deadbolts and security grills on the windows and lock the doors. You know it won't be the perfect protection against burglary, but it will make that job a little bit harder. This legislation is about introducing some friction into the process and perhaps tipping the normal point, if you like, between children being overwhelmingly online and somewhat less overwhelmingly online.

There are also important concerns about privacy. I share those concerns. The amendments that the coalition will be introducing will seek to strengthen protections on privacy. It's important to emphasise this. We don't expect and, I think, would be opposed to any digital platforms seeking hard forms of identification from users of any age to verify their identity. It is not part of this legislation that people will be expected to hand over their driver's licence, their passport details or their Medicare card. We expect social media platforms to use their existing datasets and technology and other behavioural tells to make a reasonable estimate of someone's age and take reasonable steps, as the legislation says, to assure them of their age. This doesn't mean it will be perfect. This means that some people under 16 will be able to fool social media platforms. I anticipate there might be people over 16 who should be allowed to use a platform and won't be able to.

But I would say that this technology does exist. We've seen that. TikTok has used the technology. They told a Senate inquiry just earlier this year that they've removed about one million under-age users from their platforms, not by asking them their age but by detecting the patterns of their behaviour that most correlate with a particular age cohort. We have US jurisdictions that are already introducing and using this. Amongst them are Louisiana, Texas, Tennessee and Florida. They're not known as bastions of social progressivism. They're often quite Republican leaning and relatively conservative electorates, but they have introduced and embraced this legislation, and the digital platforms operating in those jurisdictions have had to find a way to comply with the legislation. So the technology does exist, and, with a nudge or a push from our government and this government, that technology will get better.

Importantly, it will be some time until this legislation comes into effect, and the parliament will have a regular opportunity to review it and review its operation. I think that will be important, because I recognise this is a new piece of legislation. I'm not going to stand here and pretend that this piece of legislation, if passed, will stop bullying or stop the development of eating disorders or stop social isolation. There are a range of contributing factors to that. But if we can provide some help to parents in the right direction to help lessen the potentiation, the super acceleration that social media platforms provide to some of these things, I think that's a step forward.

David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) | Link to this | Hansard source

I firstly want to associate myself with the contribution from my colleague Senator Hanson-Young. I think she hit the nail on the head in her take-down of the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024, an incredibly inappropriate and rushed piece of legislation. Let's call it out for what it is. This is a deeply flawed and dangerous proposal by people who appear to have never been on the internet or met a teenager. It's a bill to appease Rupert Murdoch and the news stable, and its implementation, if we ever get that far, will be a hot mess. This is the kind of legislation that's brought to the parliament by a prime minister and a bunch of people in Labor and the opposition who get their staff to print their emails out for them. That's the legislation we've got before us.

The evidence against it is literally overwhelming. We have child mental health experts who say that this could dangerously isolate many kids who use social media to find essential support at particular times when they need it. We have IT and government specialists who say that it cannot work. We have privacy advocates who are saying that this will reach into the privacy of everybody who engages in social media, not just kids but adults. We have human rights organisations who are pretty much all united in opposition to this law. We have government agencies, like the OAIC, who say, 'Don't do this.' It's an extraordinarily broad alliance of people. I can't really recall such a kind of united breadth of opposition to legislation that Labor and the coalition, Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton, both whose names start with Mr, are joining together to ram through with a sham inquiry in the last few hours of parliamentary sitting this year.

Why are those people—the mental health experts, IT and government specialists, privacy advocates and human rights organisations—all joining together to oppose this legislation? Because this policy will hurt vulnerable young people the most, especially in regional communities and especially in LGBTQI communities, by cutting them off from the support that they need and the support that they can sometimes only get on social media. To be clear: it has not worked anywhere in the world where these kinds of thought bubbles have grown and then popped. So why are we ramming it through with so little scrutiny here? Why does the Albanese Labor government suddenly want to work on absolutely everything with Mr Peter Dutton?

Sue Lines (President) | Link to this | Hansard source

The time for this debate has concluded. Senator Shoebridge, you'll be in continuation.