QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE

Ms WELLS (Lilley—Minister for Sport and Minister for Communications) (14:49): I thank the member for Bean for his question and for the opportunity to join him at St Mary MacKillop College Canberra to talk to students about their own experiences online. Social media can have a devastating impact on people with eating disorders and body image issues. Toxic and predatory algorithms expose Australians to fitspiration and thinspiration content, blasting images and advice that reinforce unrealistic ideals and harmful behaviour.

That is why, building on Australia's social media minimum age law, our proposed digital duty of care calls out material and conduct that encourages, promotes or instructs disordered eating as being harmful to under-18s. Social media platforms, online games and AI chatbots will be required to have systems in place to prevent young people from being exposed to pro-eating-disorder content.

To make sure companies are following their duty, the eSafety Commissioner and accredited Australian researchers need the ability to check the homework of these platforms—Australian researchers like Dr Rys Farthing of Reset.Tech and Dr Hannah Jarman of Deakin University. Dr Farthing and Dr Jarman conducted a study of 1,204 pieces of pro-eating-disorder content on social media.

They created under-18 and over-18 sock-puppet accounts and reported the 1,204 pieces of content on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, YouTube and Pinterest to see whether the platforms took them down. What they found was shocking but, unfortunately, unsurprising. On Instagram, only 10.7 per cent of that material was taken down.

When reported to YouTube, only seven per cent of the pro-eating-disorder content was taken down. On X, it was 4.5 per cent. This is the kind of mystery-shopping-style test that social media platforms, online games and AI chatbots should be accountable for in Australia.

But these Australian researchers had to conduct their study in Italy, in Poland and in Germany, because, right now, in Australia, they have no protection from legal threats. That is the kind of transparency and accountability that the coalition want to block when they say sock puppets are an Orwellian spy operation. The coalition have asked for an explanation of why sock-puppet accounts are needed.

This is why: to hold these companies to account for the harm they are causing young Australians, to not just listen to what the companies are saying but to check what they are actually doing. This is what the digital duty of care will deliver and why the coalition needs to put politics to the side and work with the parliament to get this done. (Time expired)