Online Safety Amendment (Strengthening Enforcement for the Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2026
Senator FARUQI (New South Wales—Deputy Leader of the Australian Greens) (19:21): The Online Safety Amendment (Strengthening Enforcement for the Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2026 is supposed to be about keeping children safe online, but it barely scratches the surface of the much uglier truth. Something deeply disturbing is happening to our young people. A teenage boy opens TikTok or YouTube looking for gym videos or gaming clips.
Before long, the algorithm starts pushing him somewhere much darker. They are being told women are liars, feminism is the enemy, and girls owe you sex. When a Herald journalist posed online as a 17-year-old boy, it took just 13 minutes for TikTok to serve up manosphere content—13 minutes for the algorithm to start pulling a child down a rabbit hole of vile misogyny.
This stuff doesn't just stay on a screen. Teachers are seeing boys parrot Andrew Tate in classrooms. Researchers are finding terrifying attitudes towards women, consent and sexual violence amongst teenage boys and young men.
These algorithms are teaching boys how to see girls, and girls are living with the consequences. They are sexually harassed, abused, choked, assaulted, raped and killed, and those same girls opened their own phones to be bombarded with content telling them they are too fat or too ugly as thinspo and the latest skinny-tok trend take over their feeds. They see other women being mocked and trolled.
They are fed content about eating disorders, self-harm and suicide. Seventy per cent of Australian children aged 10 to 15 have encountered harmful content online. This isn't some harmless teenage entertainment.
We have handed some of the most powerful corporations on earth direct access to our children's minds, and they are poisoning them for profit. These platforms have become some of the most powerful radicalisation machines humanity has ever created. Racism, misogyny, Islamophobia, conspiracy theories, far-right propaganda—the algorithm doesn't care how dangerous something is.
It cares whether you keep watching. Watch one angry video, and it gives you another. Show an interest in one conspiracy, and it offers you something more extreme.
Linger on some racist garbage, and suddenly your feed is overflowing with it. Now AI slop, deepfakes and industrial scale misinformation are pouring into that toxic soup, which is fuelled by the far right and their wealthy backers. I should know.
I am a perpetual target. Tech oligarchs and their loyal politicians have helped build an information system where hate and lies reach millions in an instant, giving extremists an algorithm that helps them recruit. This is radicalisation at an industrial scale.
Instead of fighting the far right and instead of fighting racism and misogyny, some of the richest corporations on earth deliver them straight into our kids' pockets. Behind these big tech and social media machines are some of the richest and most powerful men who have ever lived—men like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. Zuckerberg has amassed billions upon billions building deliberately addictive platforms that harm children.
Elon Musk bought one of the world's biggest social media platforms, gutted its safety features and turned himself into a political powerbroker. These are not quirky tech geniuses playing with apps. These are evil men controlling what billions of people see, believe and fear.
Their corporations profit from our anger and our fear. The Greens support stronger enforcement against corporations that break the law, but taking on this crisis means taking on some of the richest and most powerful companies and billionaires on earth. Let's be real.
Labor hasn't got a great track record of taking on corporations and billionaires, but the community advocates and Greens have pushed them all the way to take the steps that they have announced today. The details of the proposed duty of care model will be a test of whether Labor backs the people or the corporations in the struggle for our attention and wellbeing.
To start, we can't have a situation where harmful algorithms remain the highly addictive default. Then we have to make sure penalties for social media oligarchs are more than a slap on the wrist or just another court settlement for them. We won't change their behaviour until we threaten their noxious business model.
We will be looking at the proposal extremely closely, because history teaches us that, when the choice is between corporate profits and real people being harmed, Labor always finds a way to protect profits. Boys can be funnelled into misogyny. Girls can be taught to hate their bodies.
Racism and far-right extremism can be pumped into millions of homes. Our democracy can be flooded with lies. God forbid Mark Zuckerberg's bottom line takes a hit!
Enough of that. We need to break the toxic algorithms and hold these corporations legally responsible for the harms that they create. Our children—and everybody else, for that matter—do not exist to generate profits for billionaires.
Our democracy is not theirs to dismantle, and our future should not be determined by Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk and wherever their next billions come from.