Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Environment and Water) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The government does not agree with aspersions cast by this motion. We do, however, acknowledge the keen interest in this chamber in the delivery of the Albanese government's world-leading social media minimum age. With regard to the order being discussed, the government has previously outlined that this information has been provided by the independent regulator. A regulator is best placed to provide a holistic picture of the wider digital environment, not individual companies. Further to this, as the senator might be able to appreciate, disclosure of the specific information obtained by eSafety has the ability to prejudice the regulator's ongoing ability to appropriately and effectively investigate compliance.

It's interesting to see the opposition repeatedly siding with big tech over our very own regulator, a regulator I would remind the coalition they appointed not once but twice. While this government delivers, those opposite have been focused on division and disinformation. At every opportunity, the coalition have talked down Australia's world-leading work to protect children online. In spite of this, we've stayed focused on the task of protecting children online and giving parents the tools to navigate an increasingly dangerous and complex online environment.

Fatima Payman (WA, Australia's Voice) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the minister's explanation.

We are now three months and two High Court cases into the social media ban, and it all seems to be going swimmingly. The kids are out there kicking the footy, youth in regional and rural areas have been cut off from their online support networks and there has been a spike of young people ringing Kids Helpline as a direct consequence of this ban. In fact, headspace have said that one in 10 young people have cited the ban as a factor in their seeking mental health support.

In January, we saw the tastefully delayed figure of 4.7 million accounts paraded in triumph throughout the broadsheets and tabloids of this country that had campaigned so forcefully for this law. Since that number has come out, many questions have been raised about the accuracy of the government's data. According to the AFR, it included inactive accounts, duplicate accounts and accounts the users had already closed. Senator Dean Smith, like many of us, has been interested in the origin of this figure, but the government has not complied with his order for the production of documents, and eSafety has not released platform by platform data that we have requested.

I was reading an interesting paper by the former Clerk of the Senate Harry Evans. In a 2008 paper entitled 'The Senate, Accountability and Government Control' he wrote:

In the Parliament of 2001-04, there were 89 orders and more than half of them, 46, were not complied with. The reasons given by the government for not producing documents came to be increasingly remote from any recognisable claim of public interest immunity, and often consisted of simple assertions that documents were confidential and off-hand dismissals of the non-government parties' interests in the information.

It seems there is nothing new under the sun when it comes to governments that are determined to be secretive, even when it means defying the Senate and the powers granted to it under section 49 of our Constitution.

Everyone's got a story of how their little cousin got around the social media ban or how they didn't get kicked off at all. Even if the ban worked and kids under 16 all had their accounts taken away, they can still go on YouTube and watch brainrot shorts, and they can still go on Discord and get bullied and groomed.

Consider the opening sentence in an article in WAtoday from January:

Underage Snapchat users are verifying their accounts by scanning the faces of people who are decades older and of a different gender, exposing a major loophole in the Albanese government's signature policy.

This is one of the many issues that will be considered during the two-year longitudinal survey of the social media ban. This is the very same survey that eSafety has said will cost nearly $1½ million. Why didn't they work out these problems before putting the ban in place? I mean, you wouldn't have to pay me $1.46 million to know that this wasn't going to work. It was obvious at the time that this would happen. This wasn't a considered, refined policy, and it wasn't even a policy made on the run. It was just the government having vibes to ban social media. It was an idea designed to prey on the fears of parents, even though any considered analysis threw up series of questions the government has never had to answer and has never had an answer to.

So how did the government address this? It stopped the analysis from occurring. Like Alex Jones, this government is conducting information warfare to stymie this chamber's ability to scrutinise its activities. In his 2019 speech entitled 'Labor and democracy', the Prime Minister said:

Building a better future for our country starts with a full-blooded assault on the culture of fear, censorship and denial that the Morrison Government is trying to foist upon us.

The assault on the Morrison culture never happened; the culture was simply put under new management.

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

():  I rise to take note of the minister's attendance on this issue today. What we have seen since this government brought in the social media ban is virtually nothing else done. Virtually nothing else has been done to make sure our social media companies are providing safe places for not just young people but people of all ages, those who fall through the cracks, those that are legitimately all still online and those that access YouTube without having a logged-in account. That's how most kids are watching YouTube these days. Without an account, you can access anything you want.

We've just had a landmark ruling in the United States today that has found that Meta and Google have deliberately used their platforms to target people with addictive algorithms that cause them harm. These big multibillion- and multitrillion-dollar companies are making massive profits off a product that they have designed to be deliberately harmful and addictive, just like poker machines. The gambling industry designed poker machines to be addictive, and that addiction is harmful. It is exactly the same with these big social media companies. These platforms are harmful and dangerous. Today in the United States, a jury has just ruled that they are so harmful that these big social media companies now need to pay and that they are liable.

What is the Australian government going to do about this? Yes, they've brought in the social media ban, and that deals with knocking some young people offline, but it does nothing to force these platforms to provide safe spaces for their users—for the public. We are now in a world where social media is effectively a service that everybody uses. It's how people engage with government services, how they engage with access to information in their community, how they stay connected to their friends and family, how they trade and run businesses and how they connect with their educational institutions. If you're not on social media, it is very hard to be an active member of our community.

There is no online or offline anymore; it is the same, and the rules need to be the same. There needs to be responsibility targeted and held at the feet of these big social media companies where, if they're going to engage and offer products and services, they must do it in a safe way. They've been making mega profits off harmful products, just like the tobacco industry and the gambling industry, and they need to be held to account. The Labor government, the Albanese government, promised well over 18 months ago that they would introduce rules and laws to force these companies to have a duty of care to the people who access their products. Eighteen months later and we've seen nothing from the Albanese government. The minister has been asleep at the wheel on this.

These platforms and big tech bros continue to make money off Australians from products that they know are harmful and deliberately designed to be addictive. Doomscrolling is not by accident. Doomscrolling is a deliberate design feature. The tech companies have known this for years; they have sold their advertising and data access on that basis. It is part of their business model. That needs to be tackled head-on. We've got to have a government that has the guts to take on the tech companies properly and force them to have a duty of care to the Australian people.

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

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

It's nice that the coalition now wants some data on their policy. Let's remember who came up with the social media ban in the first place. It was a Peter Dutton policy, cheered in by News Corp, pushed aggressively by the coalition, picked up like some sort of food pulled out of the microwave reheated by Labor and then rushed through in a God almighty rush without any evidence base. You don't have to be a genius to work out that a smart, online 14-year-old is going to find a way around whatever social media ban comes out of an unplanned rush by Albanese and Dutton. I'd put my money on a smart online 14-year-old over Peter Dutton or Prime Minister Albanese any day of the week.

What we want is the data. Show us what's actually happening. We don't want data that has been recycled out of the platforms. It's nice to hear the coalition in here, all hot under the collar, about the social media ban. It's good they've decided to pay some attention to it. Maybe they got a phone call from News Corp editors to tell them it was time to go again on this stuff. That's good. I'm glad they're finally asking for that, and we're actually supporting them in this to say: 'Let's get the data. Show us what's happened.'

If the government really wants to stand behind their social media ban on kids, why are you refusing to produce these documents? Why are you refusing to produce the evidence? You're left with this absolutely firm conclusion that they knew there was never an evidence base to support it and that they know that the data they've got is showing that kids are smarter than them and are getting around it. My observation of young people is they have one account to show mum and dad, another account for one group of friends and another account for another group of friends. Tell me which of those has been banned. No doubt the mum-and-dad show-and-tell account has been banned, but show us what's happening to the reality on the ground with young people. Again—I'm just going to repeat it—my money's on young people being smarter, cannier, more online native than whatever policy was cooked up by the dregs of Peter Dutton through a News Corp editorial office and then implemented by a follow-the-crowd Albanese government. My money is on young people getting around that any day of the week.

Why won't you show us the data? Why are we having this bizarre push? It's no doubt because the data is crazy embarrassing. It's showing what we all thought—that a half-baked plan that came out of some fettered dream of Peter Dutton was never actually going to be a way of keeping young people safe. You want to know how to keep young people safe? Implement a digital duty of care, an online duty of care. Hold platforms to account. Let people opt of toxic algorithms. That's how you keep young people safe. You make online safe for everybody, and it turns out that is going to make it a hell of a lot safer for young people. That's how you make young people safe online. Don't cut them off, isolate them socially and drive them to parts of the online world where there's even less supervision. That's how you make young people safe. You make online safer for all of us.

But you didn't want to do that job because you didn't want to take on the big platforms. You didn't want to get them to have put an option in so people could opt out of their toxic algorithms. You didn't want to put in place laws that would hold big tech accountable. Why not? It comes back to what we keep seeing with this lot. You're scared of Donald Trump. You're scared that, if you actually put any regulations in place that would hold big tech to account, you're going to get some cranky phone call from Uncle Donald who's going to say: 'How dare you do this. How dare you act in the Australian national interest. You have to give priority access to major online US tech platforms, and, if you don't, I'll come and hunt you down.' That's what this is all about. You are just continuing to surrender any sense of what's right for Australians because you're scared of an attack from Donald Trump and his right wing, aggressive, America first—well I say Australians first, not Trump first. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.