What about the legal challenges that are already being floated?

Anthony Albanese:

We want this to be cooperative. We make this point – social media does have a social responsibility and they also need a social license so there will be demand from the community for social media companies to engage constructively. We don’t do this easily. What we do though is respond to something that is needed here. We said, when I stood here with Minister Rowland last December – or November of last year – we acknowledged that this is not going to be simple or easy to go back to the previous question, some of this will be inevitably a work in progress, a response. If people are trying to get around it, how do we then respond?

But what we know is that social media does have more information about what [journalist] does than some people who are perhaps your close friends. They know where you go, who you talk to, what you’re interested in.

They do keep that information and during the election campaign, if they could identify for political parties in order to encourage us to invest on their platforms, on an issue like child care, identifying women between a particular age in a particular seat, in a particular demographic, with particular post codes, then they can help out here too. They can use the capacity which we know that they have.

Anika Wells says teachers can still use YouTube for educational purposes:

One of the reasons why that has been done (restricting who can hold a YouTube account) is to allow teachers in classrooms, if they want to show a YouTube video or what have you, or parents for that matter, something that is educational, we recognise that many of these – social media is not all bad. We aren’t saying that. We want to make sure that we restrict the harmful content.

Anika Wells says the tech giants can’t claim they didn’t know this was coming:

We are still waiting on the age assurance final recommendations to come back and we will publish those as soon as possible when we get those.

I make the distinction, there has been 12 months allowed for this to happen. Social media platforms have been on notice since December last year that this was coming. They have had 12 months to work with the eSafety Commissioner to determine what that looks like for the individual platforms.

There is technology and each platform works differently. They are all competitors. They need to work on a one on one basis with the eSafety Commissioner. Reasonable steps is reasonable. We are backing parents.

The platforms have a responsibility, a social responsibility as the PM has said. The onus here is on the platforms. Come 10 December, if your kid has a Facebook log-in, Facebook account, it is on Facebook to deactivate that account.

It is not on the parent to police that on behalf of Facebook. There are four reasonable steps that platforms have to take. They have to deactivate existing accounts.

They need to make sure, no new accounts are activated and take reasonable steps to make sure any workarounds or mitigations because kids will find a way around this and maybe they will arm swarm on LinkedIn, we don’t know. These are meant to be working rules and they need to correct errors as they arise. These aren’t set and forget rules. They are set and support rules. They are world-leading but this is manifestly too important for us not to have a crack.

Prime minister Anthony Albanese says Australia will be holding an event in New York (when he is at the UN in September) to gain more international support for the ban against the tech giants:

This is our position, it is up to other nations what they do, but I know from the discussions I have had with other leaders, that they are looking at this and they are considering what impact social media is having on young people in their respective nations and it is a common experience. This is not an Australian experience, this is a common experience which is seeing governments, including – I will be meeting with Prime Minister Luxon in a couple of weeks across the ditch. New Zealand, for example, is acting along pretty similar lines.

One of the things that gets missed in some reporting is that it won’t be kids who have to prove they are over 16 – it will be all of us.

One of the things that gets missed in some reporting is that it won’t be kids who have to prove they are over 16 – it will be all of us.

Here is the official statement on the social media ban:

The Albanese Labor Government is backing Australian families, parents and kids by announcing today YouTube will be included in its world-leading under-16 social media laws.
 
Delaying access to social media, including YouTube, until the age of 16 will protect young Australians at a critical stage of their development, giving them three more years to build real world connections and online resilience.
 
Following extensive consultation and advice, age-restricted social media platforms will face fines of up to $49.5 million for failing to take responsible steps to prevent underage account holders onto their services.
 
Age-restricted social media platforms will include Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, X and YouTube, amongst other platforms.
 
Informed by advice from the eSafety Commissioner, the Online Safety (Age-Restricted Social Media Platforms) Rules 2025 tabled today specify which types of online services will not be captured by the social media legislation, including online gaming, messaging apps, health and education services.
 
These types of online services have been excluded from the new minimum age obligations because they pose fewer social media harms to under 16s, or are regulated under different laws.
 
From 10 December 2025, all services that meet the definition of ‘age-restricted social media platform’ in the Act, and are not excluded in the rules, will be subject to the social media minimum age law.
 
Age restricted social media accounts are defined as services that allow users to interact and post material.
 
The Government is proud to be on the side of families.
 

You can tell the government is very excited about the social media ban – Anthony Albanese will be part of the official press conference with Anika Wells at 10am and it is being held in the prime minister’s courtyard – the most fancy of all press conference locations.

Australia has a proud history of disruptive protest – although you might not realise it from the political reaction to protests over the last fortnight.  

In an article today I describe several defining moments of Australian political protest. At the time, many derided these protests but most Australians would endorse them today: campaigns for women’s rights, against apartheid, for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sovereignty, and workers’ strikes to stop iron exports to Japan during World War 2.  

This week, NSW Labor Premier Chris Minns opposed a pro-Palestinian protest to march across the Sydney Harbour Bridge.  

Last week, the Australian Senate censured Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi for her silent protest, holding up a sign that read:  

GAZA IS STARVING  

WORDS WON’T FEED THEM  

SANCTION ISRAEL  

Politicians are often critical of peaceful protest. State parliaments have legislated to make it harder to protest lawfully, or hit people with large fines for protesting.  

It is easy to forget that most Australians say peaceful protest has a role to play in Australian democracy, and support introducing a federal right to protest.  

There have also been protests in Parliament. Senators Bob Brown and Kerry Nettle protested the Iraq War when he disrupted US President George W Bush’s speech to the Australian Parliament.  

Bush said “I love free speech” after he was interrupted. The speaker ordered the serjeant-at-arms to remove the Greens senators from the chamber, but Brown and Nettle refused to go and were not forcibly removed.   

Sorry about the break in transmission there – my computer decided it just was going to NOT and obviously while we all have sympathy for that attitude, we must endure.

Back with normal transmission now.