Online Safety Amendment (Strengthening Enforcement for the Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2026
Senator WALKER (South Australia) (18:27): I rise to speak on the Online Safety Amendment (Strengthening Enforcement for the Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2026. I think a lot of people here know that I did grow up on the internet. I remember Instagram becoming a thing, Snapchat taking off and Musical.ly turning into TikTok.
Social media has been a part of almost my entire life, and I still use it. I won't stand here and pretend that social media is 100 per cent terrible because I don't think that's true. It keeps people connected.
It helps people find communities, learn new things, organise, create and stay in touch. It can be genuinely funny and interesting and useful, but it's also incredibly addictive. I know the experience of opening TikTok because someone sent you one video and then finding yourself there 40 minutes later.
I know what it's like to grow up in a world where there's always a group chat, always something happening and always something you haven't seen yet. For young people now, there isn't really an online world and an offline world. It's all mixed together.
Previous generations could have a terrible day at school, come home, shut the front door and get a break from it. For a lot of young people today, the group chat comes home with you. The comments come home with you.
The comparison comes home with you. The person who was horrible to you at school can still reach you at 9 o'clock that night. If everyone else is online, putting your phone away doesn't feel like taking a break.
Sometimes it feels like removing yourself from your own social life. I think many older people sometimes underestimate that. We talk about young people being addicted to their phones as though an entire generation collectively developed this strange character flaw, but these platforms have been deliberately designed to hold people's attention.
Some of the biggest and most sophisticated tech companies in the world employ the smartest people to work around the clock to figure out what will keep us watching, clicking and coming back. Kids didn't design that system. Kids didn't build the algorithms.
They aren't the ones making billions of dollars from keeping people scrolling, so I don't think the way forward is another round of adults lecturing teenagers about their screen time. The responsibility has to sit with the platforms as well. That is the principle behind Australia's social media minimum age.
We have asked age restricted social media platforms to take reasonable steps to prevent children under 16 from holding accounts. We haven't made parents the internet police, and we haven't put the legal burden on a 14-year-old to somehow resist products that have been designed by enormous companies to keep them using them. We have put that responsibility where it belongs: with the companies running the platforms.
And we were the first country in the world to do it. That means learning as we go. More than five million underage accounts have already been deactivated.
That is a huge number, and it shows that these laws are having an effect. The eSafety Commissioner has identified serious compliance concerns and poor practices with investigations now underway into Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube. That is where this bill comes in.
The eSafety Commissioner has been doing the job parliament asked her to do and in the process has found places where she needs stronger powers to properly investigate whether these enormous companies are complying with the law, so we're giving her those powers. We're also making the penalties more serious because the consequences have to mean something to companies of this size.
The maximum civil penalty for noncompliance with the minimum age obligation will double to $109.2 million, and the amendments will give eSafety greater ability to get behind the corporate response and actually find out what happened, including questioning decision-makers and executives and seeking evidence from former employees. I don't think we need to overcomplicate the reason for doing that.
If a social media company tells Australians it has taken reasonable steps to keep under-16s off the platform, our regulator should be able to check. If something clearly isn't working, we should be able to ask the people making the decisions why, and, if a company is breaking Australian law, the penalty shouldn't be an amount it can comfortably absorb as the cost of doing business.
These are some of the richest companies in the world. They know an extraordinary amount about their users. They know what we watch.
They know what we click. They know what ads are most likely to work on us. They can work out that I have become interested in something based on three seconds of hesitation over a video.
They can build incredibly detailed pictures of what people look like, what keeps them engaged and what will bring them back tomorrow. But, when governments start asking questions about age verification and child safety, suddenly we hear a lot about how technically difficult everything is. Australians are entitled to be a little bit sceptical about that.
Nobody expects a perfect system, and of course some will try and find workarounds. I'm 22. It was not so long ago that I was a teenager myself.
I can assure the chamber that telling a 15-year-old that they are absolutely forbidden from doing something has never, ever guaranteed that they won't do it. But there is a pretty big difference between a teenager finding a clever workaround and a platform barely trying in the first place. That is why the law talks about reasonable steps, and I think that gets lost sometimes when we talk about this policy.
The social media minimum age is often discussed as though the government has decided young people can't be trusted with the internet. I don't see it that way. Young people have been dealing with the consequences of these platforms for years.
We know what it feels like when a photo of you you don't like gets posted. We know what it feels like to see everyone at something you weren't invited to. We know how quickly a joke can turn nasty online.
We know about cyberbullying. We know about the constant comparison. We know about the pressure that comes from seeing hundreds of edited, filtered, carefully selected versions of other people's lives every day and trying not to compare them with our own.
For teenage girls in particular, this comparison can be relentless. You can scroll through hundreds of faces and bodies in an hour, many of them filtered, edited, posed or AI generated, and somehow you're supposed to remember the whole time that none of it is a reasonable standard against which to judge yourself. That is a lot to ask of a 13-year-old.
Then there's the pressure to be available all the time. A message comes through and people can see you've read it. Someone sends a message in the group chat and everyone else is reacting.
Someone leaves you on 'seen' and suddenly you're wondering what that means. These things can sound trivial when you describe them in parliament, but when you're 14 they don't feel trivial. Your friends are your world at that age.
School is your world. Being included matters enormously. And now all those social dynamics can continue every hour of the day.
That's why we have to be careful about treating this issue as a question of individual self-control. Adults struggle with these platforms, too. I struggle to put my phone down sometimes.
I see plenty of people in this building who struggle to put their phone down. Yet we expect a 13-year-old to demonstrate perfect discipline against products that are designed specifically to keep them engaged. Parents have been left trying to manage this all at home.
They're deciding when their child gets a phone, which apps they're allowed to use, how much screen time is too much, whether phones stay out of bedrooms at night, whether they should be checking messages, and how much privacy a teenager should have. And the rules that might work for one family might be completely impossible for another, because if every kid in the class is using something then banning your own child from it has social consequences.
I have a lot of sympathy for parents trying to work that out. There isn't a handbook. A lot of parents themselves are working through a technological change that they never experienced themselves.
And every few years there's another platform, another trend, another feature and another problem they're expected to understand. Government can't make those decisions for every family, but we can stop pretending that families should carry the whole load themselves. Parents should be able to say, 'There are rules here.' Platforms have responsibilities as well.
And young people should be able to expect the same thing, because I don't think young Australians want to be treated like they're stupid. When I speak to young people they're usually very aware of the trade-offs. They know social media can be brilliant and terrible at the same time.
They know they probably spend too much time on it. They know some of what they see isn't good for them. They also know that telling them to delete Instagram when all their friends are on it is not a viable plan.
Young people want the environments they use to be better, and there are things only the companies controlling those environments can change. They control the algorithms. They control the recommendations and the notifications.
They control what gets amplified and what doesn't. They decide how easy it is to report abuse, how quickly that report is dealt with and what happens next. They know exactly how design affects behaviour, because their businesses depend on it.
So when we're asking them to put some of that expertise towards keeping kids safer, I don't think we're asking too much. For years, the response to problems online has tended to come back to the user: block them, report them, change the settings, spend less time online, parents should supervise their kids more closely, young people should be more careful about what they post.
All those things can be useful advice, but the company that built the environment can't be allowed to disappear from the conversation. That is the shift we are trying to make. We have said that social media companies have responsibilities to the people who are using their products.
We have said that children deserve particular protection, and we have said that when parliament puts those responsibilities into Australian law they have to be enforceable. It was not unexpected that this framework would require some adjustment. It was the first of its kind in the world.
Technology moves ridiculously quickly. Algorithms will change. Young people will find new platforms.
Companies will find different ways of doing things. Our laws need to be able to respond to the changing circumstances and practical experience as they emerge. That's what we're doing here.
The eSafety Commissioner has started enforcing the social media minimum age and has told us where the gaps are. We are closing those gaps, and we will keep watching what happens. Ultimately, I want young Australians to get the good parts of growing up online without being expected to accept all of the bad parts as the price of admission.
I want them to find communities. I want them to talk to their friends. I want them to discover weird music and niche hobbies and to talk to people on the other side of the world who care about the same things they do.
I want young people to be able to use technology in ways that make their lives bigger and more interesting. But I also want a 13-year old to be able to go home from school and actually escape the worst day of their life for a few hours, I want parents to feel like someone else is helping them carry this and I want the companies making enormous amounts of money from our attention to accept that they have some responsibility for what happens on the platforms that they built.
We know the platforms can do better, so we will keep pushing them to do better. We will give the eSafety Commissioner the tools to find out what is actually happening, and, when the companies don't take their obligations seriously, there will be consequences that are large enough for them to notice. I think that is a much fairer balance for parents, users and especially the kids, who are growing up in a world where being online is simply a part of being young.