Online Safety Amendment (Strengthening Enforcement for the Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2026
Senator HANSON-YOUNG (South Australia—Manager of Australian Greens Business in the Senate) (13:13): I rise to contribute to the debate today on the Online Safety Amendment (Strengthening Enforcement for the Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2026. Let me say at the outset that the government's social media ban for those under 16 has been an utter failure. It's not just a failure in terms of how the law was drafted, which is why we're here today—this particular piece of legislation has to fix mistakes that were written into the original piece of legislation passed almost two years ago—but a failure because the proof is now in the pudding and we can see that 80 per cent of young people are still online and still accessing social media.
Their access to those platforms is now more unsafe than it was two years ago. Social media is more unsafe now than when the government's social media ban first passed this parliament almost two years ago. The reason for that is that the laws never actually made social media companies provide a safer product.
They never had to deal with the harms that young people face every day when they're scrolling on their phones, when they're messaging their friends and when they're being bombarded with content that is addictive, that is harmful and that preys on their vulnerabilities and their emotions. When the social media ban was first put to this parliament almost two years ago, I stood in this exact place and said it would fail to keep people safe and that we needed a digital duty of care and legal requirements on these platforms to provide a product that is safe to use and to ensure that the product that is promoted and pushed into the community is one that is based on safety first, not profits first, not addiction first.
I said to the government at the time that we needed to regulate algorithms—the technology that is kept behind closed doors, kept secret, but uses individuals' data to feed addiction and to manipulate. The government refused to do either of those things. However, today we see the Prime Minister standing up in the Prime Minister's courtyard, announcing that this government will finally move on putting in place a digital duty of care.
Years later, the government has finally seen the warning signs and can see the writing on the wall that just trying to kick young people off social media has failed to keep them safe. All of the experts were telling the government this years ago, consistently. I'm looking forward to being able to go through the details of the exposure draft, as announced by the government today.
The Greens are prepared to roll up our sleeves and make sure legislation can pass this place if it actually protects people. We need legislation in this place that holds big tech to account and that makes sure their product is safe to use and not designed purely to make maximum profit off of harm and addiction. Big companies, like Meta in the United States, have just had to settle huge, multibillion-dollar court cases because their product has been found to be deliberately designed to be addictive.
Their product grooms people. It takes private data, puts it into the algorithm and uses the algorithm to force-feed content that feeds people's insecurities, feeds their fears, feeds their anger and feeds their desire. The way the technology is designed to work is that it keeps you scrolling through this cesspit of outrage, depression, horror and emotion.
Big tech doesn't care what content is being force-fed into the hands and the devices of our young people. All they care about is that it will spread like wildfire because every click, every share and every view makes big tech more money. We have an opportunity to fix this today.
We have an opportunity to look at how we can hold big tech's feet to the fire. We've got to hit them where it hurts, and that is their business model. Their business model is these addictive algorithms—design features that are deliberately designed and tailored and tweaked to keep people addicted, to use people's data to manipulate them into staying online longer and isolating themselves from their real friends, and to suck them down rabbit holes into places where no child should go.
We know that these social media companies are going to arc up. They're going to push back really hard on any suggestion of a digital duty of care because they know that if the law is put in place properly, if it's to actually do what it needs to do, it will impact on their profits. Their profits, billions and billions of dollars worth of profits, are generated from a product that is not safe, that is causing harm and that is designed to be addictive and to use people's vulnerabilities even when it is harmful.
That's why we need the digital duty of care legislated. But we need it to be right, we need it to be strong, and we need to make sure it actually puts the safety of Australians first, not the profits and the concerns of big tech. We need to make sure that for individual users—whether we're young, old or in between—it's our choice what we want to follow, what's in our feeds, what information we consume and what we seek out and that we choose our own feeds, not big tech.
It's a basic freedom-of-choice argument. If I'm a customer, I should be able to choose what it is that I want to see, what it is that I want to purchase and what it is that I want to consume. But the way social media currently runs and the way big tech have manipulated current laws is not about individual choice.
It doesn't give any individual user the right to choose. You're spoonfed and force fed content even when you don't want it. Back in the days when social media first started about six years ago, not that long ago at all, the majority of social media feeds were the people who you chose to follow, the accounts that you liked, the holiday destinations you wanted to dream about, the businesses that you wanted to follow and buy things from, the friends you had, the family members you wanted to stay in contact with and the celebrities you wanted to follow.
What content you wanted to see and who you wanted to associate with as an individual user was based on your choice, but that is all gone. It is now near impossible sometimes to even find in one's social media feed anybody you do follow, because people's feeds are full of what the tech companies think you should see—suggested content, content recommended by big tech.
And why is that particular feed being recommended by big tech? It's because every time you scroll on it, every time you click play, and every time you go back and watch it again it makes them money. Big tech uses addictive technology and personal data to keep us scrolling for longer even when the content that we are seeing is harmful.
It's disgusting, actually. It's disgusting that an entire industry now consumes so much of how we communicate in our lives with each other, how we do our jobs and how we find out about information. It is actually disgusting that the manipulation of the technology and the data is used to addict and feed harmful content.
It's true that social media is an unsafe place, particularly for young people. Children are still, despite the ban—because it doesn't work—being force-fed misogyny, extremism and violence. Young men are being fed information to make them feel bad about themselves, suggesting that, unless they take certain steroids, they're never going to get a girlfriend, that it is somehow the female teacher in the classroom's fault that they've done badly on their English exam or that the girl sitting next to them in the classroom doesn't deserve their respect.
The coalition on that side of the chamber, the Liberal Party, the National Party and One Nation, are all lining up to attack further regulation on big tech under some false premise that this is somehow a freedom of choice argument. It's just utter rubbish. Their talking points are directly from big tech.
This isn't about silencing anybody's point of view or stopping lawful content from being shared or posted; it is simply saying that big tech must not be able to use dangerous and harmful techniques to keep us addicted and being force-fed extremist and harmful material. It says that, if we had serious duty of care legislation with strong provisions and proper regulation of algorithms, each individual Australian who has a social media account would be in charge of their own social media.
This is actually about freedom—freedom to choose and freedom from the tricky, manipulative techniques of big tech. I know there are a lot of parents in the building today who have sadly and tragically lost their sons and daughters who've taken their own lives after spending time online and being harassed and bullied and manipulated. To those parents I say thank you for being here.
What we now need to do is to put in place laws that will actually protect young people and that will actually stop big tech from preying on their emotions and insecurities and using their emotions for profit. That's why we need a proper duty of care bill. (Time expired)