It's been a significant week for online safety in Australia, and one that demonstrates the value of our world-leading, holistic approach.
On Tuesday, eSafety issued an advisory warning about the escalating risks associated with sharing photos and videos online due to powerful and accessible AI tools that can be weaponised – particularly for school communities.
Yesterday, we announced eSafety had commenced civil penalty proceedings against the provider of the messaging service Telegram for its alleged failure to detect, disrupt, deter and remove pro-terror material, including videos of terrorist executions and mass shootings.
This is the first action of its kind under Australia’s pioneering Unlawful Material Codes and Standards, with a maximum court-issued penalty for non-compliance currently set at $54.6 million.
Yesterday also saw an announcement from Google, which will roll out new age assurance measures on Google Play, further highlighting the role of our world-leading social media delay in driving positive change across the technology ecosystem.
And today, eSafety released Early days, early insights: Understanding experiences of social media age restrictions at the three-month follow-up – the first wave of findings from a comprehensive two-year longitudinal study tracking more than 4,000 Australian children and families.
This is the first of many reports to come and it’s important to recognise the data was collected very early in the evaluation program, just three months after the social media age restrictions came into effect.
As a result, the report focuses primarily on children’s social media account ownership, their usage across platforms and the reasons why they continue to have accounts.
As I have said consistently since the start, complex reform of this nature is unwinding 20 years of social media entrenchment and will therefore take time. The impact of the law will not be measured in weeks or months but over generations.
That said, these early findings suggest the law is beginning to have an effect. Among children aged 10 to 15, social media account ownership declined from approximately 52.4 per cent to 42.1 per cent, representing around a 20 per cent reduction in ownership of under 16 social media accounts over the initial three-month period.
The findings however, also strongly suggest providers were not effectively preventing under-16s from having accounts on their platforms in the first three months. These early results reinforce concerns we identified in our March Compliance Update.
Another important early finding is that parents’ awareness of children’s social media use, particularly among girls and those aged 10 to 12, has declined. This highlights the importance of continuing open conversations within families about children’s online activities, even with the social media obligation being in effect.
That is why we encourage parents and carers to make use of eSafety’s resources, including our parent guides, webinars and practical advice. These tools are designed to help families better understand online risks, build confidence and start conversations that can make a real difference, including on our social media age restrictions hub.
But Google’s announcement this week, and others like it, show the positive spillover effects of this law — and Australia’s broader online safety framework — extending well beyond social media account deletions. By creating the right regulatory incentives, the law is helping drive practical safety improvements across the technology ecosystem, showing the impact of the law being much greater than the sum of its parts.
The social media minimum age obligation is not only about preventing children from having accounts on age-restricted social media services. It is also about achieving cultural change and stopping companies with harmful or deceptive design features from reaching our children until those services are safer by design.
eSafety’s consistent exposure of safety shortcomings through our transparency reporting and the Online Safety Codes and Standards at the centre of this week’s Federal Court proceedings provide further powerful incentives for companies to innovate and embrace Safety by Design.
Australia began advocating for Safety by Design back in 2018, working directly with technology companies to develop the principles, practices and tools needed to achieve higher levels of safety across technologies, platforms and services.
Now, we are finally seeing the technology industry adapt.
In addition to the growing availability of increasingly accurate and privacy-preserving age assurance technologies and services, major app store providers are stepping up to provide valuable age signals to age-restricted social media platforms. These signals can help services better detect, assess and respond to a user’s age without requiring the unnecessary collection or disclosure of personal information.
Google Play’s Age Signals API will allow parents to share their child’s age range directly with apps, so that the app developers can use that information to set safety settings at levels appropriate for the individual user, for example by restricting features that may be harmful or more risky to children.
The API provides an age range signal – such as 16 to 17 – and does not require identity documents or a precise birthdate. Parents can opt-in via the Family Link dashboard, giving them the choice to share or not.
These are exactly the kinds of safety innovations we want to see: practical tools that help developers create safer and more age-appropriate experiences while preserving privacy and giving users and parents greater control.
Google’s announcement follows Apple’s decision last month to roll out a suite of new child safety features, inspired by Australia’s social media delay. This was underscored explicitly in a phone call from Apple CEO Tim Cook to our Prime Minister Anthony Albanese indicating the offering these age range signals was inspired by this world-first Australian policy.
Available under Apple’s parental controls function, the new features include improvements to Screen Time settings, providing more flexibility to set limits for specific apps. They also provide additional protections to children by default.
Yesterday’s announcement by Google means that Australia’s two major mobile device operating systems are both providing additional parental controls and critical age range signals, further supporting parents who want safer, more age-appropriate experiences for their children online.
It is no coincidence that Australia has been chosen as a pilot market for both upgrades. Apple and Google’s willingness to build and deploy tools that help app developers tailor safer, age-appropriate experiences for children is a clear step in the right direction by big tech. We are encouraging every age-restricted social media platform captured by our regulatory scheme to accept these signals. If they choose not to, that will raise serious questions about their commitment to using all available tools to accurately identify the ages of Australian children.
In the case of social media, eSafety’s latest research suggests we still have a lot further to go. At the three-month mark, most young people who already had social media accounts before the legislation commenced were able to either retain those accounts or create new ones. The primary reason appears to be ineffective implementation of age assurance measures by platforms.
There was also substantial variation between platforms, both in terms of the proportion of children who continue to hold accounts and the extent to which account ownership has declined since the legislation commenced. This highlights the importance of platform-specific compliance efforts and reinforces that progress has been uneven.
The report does not constitute a legal assessment that any platform has breached their obligations. Determining whether a provider has taken the ‘reasonable steps’ required under the legislation is a complex legal and evidentiary process in Australian courts and our rigorous investigations continue.
While eSafety has observed some improvements since March and we will be detailing those in our second compliance update soon, significant concerns remain. Our enforcement stance remains firm, and we will continue using every available regulatory tool to gather evidence, hold platforms to account and protect Australian children. We will also be ready to deploy any new regulatory tools should proposed legislation be passed by Parliament.
At the same time, parents should take advantage of the growing range of parental controls and safety features becoming available. To ensure children are not downloading or accessing age-inappropriate apps, parents and carers can learn how to sign up to Apple to share their child’s age ranges with apps here. Similarly, Google Play Age Signals API simplifies this for parents by putting age-sharing controls in one place, directly inside the Google Family Link app.
Age restrictions and safety by design are complementary measures. Together, they help shift the burden away from children and parents and back onto the companies best placed to create safer online environments in the first place and to continue identifying, reducing and preventing risk at-scale.
As part of a holistic approach that also embraces education – through our outreach programs and public advisories – and interlocking regulation and transparency, they are helping build a safer online world for all Australians, especially children.
