Online Safety Amendment (Strengthening Enforcement for the Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2026

Dr RYAN (Kooyong) (16:43): Australia's world-first social media ban came into force in December 2025. As of June 2026, seven countries have implemented similar bans, four countries have legislated similar restrictions and 15 countries are actively considering taking stronger action on social media. The aspiration behind this reform is something of which Australia can be proud.

We have led the world in recognising that children deserve better protection from the harms of social media. But good intentions don't necessarily produce good policy, and aspiration and goodwill are not the same as keeping children—or adults—safe online. Immediately following the commencement of the ban, the eSafety Commissioner reported that 4.7 million age restricted accounts had been removed from social media platforms, and she described those early results as being very encouraging.

Unfortunately, she spoke too soon. By March this year, eSafety's own data showed that about 70 per cent of children who had accounts prior to that ban were still using restricted platforms. I'm hearing that in my electorate.

In February this year, a group of young constituents from Methodist Ladies' College in Kew visited my office in Kooyong. They said that the ban just wasn't working. They told me that their classmates routinely bypassed its restrictions.

Their experiences reflected exactly what the emerging evidence was beginning to show. Over time, that evidence has only become stronger. This week, researchers from the University of Newcastle published a survey of 408 Australian adolescents which found that 85 per cent were still accessing social media three months after the ban commenced.

The researchers, in fact, found very little evidence that this much-trumpeted ban had succeeded in getting young people to stop using platforms like TikTok, X, Facebook or Instagram. None of this should surprise us. I warned the House about this potential outcome in November 2024.

When this parliament first debated the social media ban, I opposed that legislation because I believed that technological workarounds—VPNs, false age declarations and other methods of circumvention—would inevitably undermine the effectiveness of a blanket ban. The data that we've seen this week confirms that those concerns were well founded. I also warned that a ban could unintentionally increase risks for those children who continued to access social media platforms.

A child who lies about their age to access Instagram is no longer recognised by the platform as a child. Whatever safety settings or other protections that might otherwise have applied disappear, and the child is then treated by the platform's algorithms as an adult. That outcome was entirely foreseeable.

It was the predictable consequence of legislating too quickly without sufficient evidence, meaningful consultation or a credible implementation strategy. It was legislation which flew in the face of the expert advice. It turned out the experts were right.

We've ended up with a policy that has failed to substantially change children's online behaviour. This brings me to the bill before the House today, the Online Safety Amendment (Strengthening Enforcement for the Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2026. On Saturday, the government proposed to double the maximum civil penalty for platform noncompliance, increasing it from $49.5 million to $99 million.

The bill also strengthens the powers of the eSafety Commissioner to compel platforms to demonstrate the steps that they have taken to comply with the ban. Those are sensible measures. We know that the eSafety Commissioner is actively investigating possible noncompliance by five platforms: Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat and TikTok.

Julie Inman Grant, the eSafety Commissioner, has sent those platforms formal notices demanding information on how they're implementing age checks. Stronger investigative powers and higher penalties will assist that work. For that reason, I support this bill.

I want Australian children to be safe in online spaces. But let's think about those legislative changes in context. Elon Musk is now the world's first trillionaire.

The maximum penalty that we're proposing for his platform, X, is approximately US$68 million at the current exchange rate. X's income in 2026 has been estimated at $1.4 billion, so A$68 million would represent about 11 to 12 days of Elon's profits. For the largest technological companies in the world, these bans and fines are still hardly an existential threat.

They risk becoming simply another cost of doing business. More fundamentally, my concerns about the bill from November remain unabated. Doubling fines on a broken system doesn't fix the system.

Empowering the eSafety Commissioner with stronger powers helps with monitoring and enforcement, but it doesn't reduce the harm that, as we've heard from both sides of the House today, still exists in online spaces. In 2024, I asked the House: what is the problem that we are trying to solve with this legislation? Is the problem that children and teenagers are using social media platforms, or is the problem that billion-dollar companies are marketing unsafe digital products in Australia?

I said then and I say now that a ban is not going to address the root causes of online risks. It's not going to make platforms safe for anybody—not for young Australians, not for other Australians. Age-gating will not make an unsafe product safe.

If the product itself creates unacceptable risks then regulation should focus on the product and not simply on restricting who can access it. That's why I continue to believe that Australia needs a comprehensive digital duty of care. The government has committed to introducing one later this year, with somewhat less urgency than it has demonstrated in putting this legislation in front of the House this week.

Digital products should be designed according to public health principles, with safety built in from the outset rather than added as an afterthought. The evidence supporting that approach continues to grow. Excessive and addictive use of digital media has been associated with poor physical health, poorer sleep patterns, reduced social connectedness and worse mental health outcomes for many young people.

While researchers continue to investigate questions of causation, the evidence is already more than sufficient to justify stronger safeguards. Those safeguards should apply to everybody. We should require platforms to design products that are safe by default, that are more transparent, that are less addictive and that are more accountable.

But, instead, we've created incentives for children to conceal their age, deceive their parents and thereby lose the protections that currently exist. A digital duty of care would achieve what I argued for when this online safety legislation was first put in front of the House. It would preserve the legitimate benefits that social media provides while making digital platforms safer for everybody.

Back then, I said social media is not just entertainment. For many young Australians, including those under 16, it is a source of essential information. It's where they get their media knowledge from.

It's a source of education; they all love YouTube videos. It's a source of community and it's a source of civic participation. That is particularly true for LGBTQIA+ young people, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people, culturally and linguistically diverse communities, young people living in remote and regional Australia and young Australians with a disability.

For many of those young people, online communities provide communities that are impossible or at least difficult for them to find offline. Access to social media may well be more important than ever for those young people with a disability who will soon be moved off the NDIS by this government. Those who remain in the NDIS will soon have their social and community participation supports cut in half.

We know where they'll be turning. Young Australians also exercise democratic participation online. They increasingly access news, debate public issues and engage in political communication through social media platforms.

That makes the constitutional issues raised by this legislation difficult to ignore. Reddit has now challenged the validity of the social media ban in the High Court on the basis of implied freedom of political communication. The government should explain how it intends to respond to those concerns.

Finally, if we are serious about taking on a public health approach to this online environment, then we should apply that principle consistently. A public health approach is not simply about restricting access. It's about reducing foreseeable harm at the source.

It's about ensuring that digital products are designed to be safer, that harmful commercial practices are addressed and that companies take responsibility for the risks that they create. Australia's young people are growing up in a digital environment. It's built for engagement, not for wellbeing.

The costs are now plain to see: rising rates of anxiety, depression, sleep deprivation and gambling-related harm in our children and our teenagers. Social media platforms have been allowed to operate for much too long without a legislated duty of care. They optimise algorithms for time on screen while exposing minors to harmful content, predatory contact and addictive design features that our children are simply not equipped to resist.

At the same time, the explosion of gambling advertising and online wagering products has normalised betting for the next generation. It has embedded harm into our homes through kids' phones and screens rather than betting shops. A digital duty of care would shift that legal and moral obligation back onto the platforms.

It would require them to proactively identify and mitigate risks to our children rather than just react after the damage is done. Coupled with stronger restrictions on gambling promotion and advertising, it's not about restricting freedom or innovation; it's about ensuring that the platforms that shape our children's daily lives are held to the same standard of care that we would expect of any product or service that was marketed to our young people.

We owe it to young Australians and to their families to act before further harm accumulates, not after. That's why it's difficult to understand why the government has this urgency about social media while it continues to drag its heels on online gambling harm and on other safety concerns in the public space. The Murphy report called for a comprehensive ban on all gambling advertising online that leaves no room for circumvention.

But, under the government's reforms, if a person is logged into an account, they'll be exposed to online gambling ads until they opt out. That is not a safe digital environment for Australians, and it's incongruent with the principles that are expressed in this bill. So, when the government's gambling legislation is introduced into parliament, I will be introducing a detailed amendment that will honour the late Peta Murphy, that will honour her clear recommendation that Australia needs a comprehensive ban on online gambling advertising that leaves no room for circumvention.

My amendment will provide for a full ban on online gambling advertising across digital platforms, including social media, streaming services and online video environments, where Australians are now currently routinely exposed to targeted content. My amendment will ensure that Australia's approach to online safety is consistent, that we don't take a strong regulatory approach to one set of harms, as we are here, while continuing to tolerate another source of significant harm to young Australians and their families.

If we are serious about an evidence based public health approach to Australia's digital environment, then we cannot be selective in its application. We can't treat social media harm to children as urgent, as the government is doing today, while treating their exposure to gambling harm in online spaces as optional. So I commend this bill to the House, but I ask the government for more, more quickly and more effectively.

In doing so, I move: That all words after "House" be omitted with a view to substituting the following words: "(1) notes that: (a) strengthened penalties and expanded information-gathering powers for the eSafety Commissioner are sensible improvements to enforcement of the Online Safety Act 2021; (b) effective online safety policy requires a consistent approach to harm prevention across digital environments; and (c) the Government does not plan to implement key recommendations of the House Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs' You Win Some, You Lose More report, including a comprehensive prohibition on online gambling advertising, leaving Australian children and families exposed to significant and well-evidenced harms; and (2) calls on the Government to apply the same priority to addressing the harms of online gambling advertising as it has demonstrated in relation to social media regulation".

The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Mr Georganas ): Is the amendment seconded? Dr Scamps: I second the amendment and reserve my right to speak.