Australia Releases Exposure Draft of Digital Duty of Care Bill

The Australian government released an exposure draft of the Online Safety Amendment (Digital Duty of Care) Bill 2026 in September, requiring digital service providers including social media platforms, generative AI services, messaging apps and interactive online games to assess and mitigate foreseeable harms to users. The draft legislation mandates that platforms offer users a choice between algorithmic feeds and non-personalised content from friends only, protects children from harmful content and addictive features, and subjects companies to fines of nearly 110 million Australian dollars for breaches, with enforcement powers vested in the eSafety Commissioner and approved academic researchers granted access to platform data.

When platforms are required by law to reduce harm but lack systematic means to detect it at scale, the duty devolves to reactive moderation rather than real-time prevention. Guardii's anti-grooming and anti-sextortion detection modules operate at the point of contact in direct messages across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord and Roblox, identifying patterns of coercion, escalation and age-inappropriate targeting as they unfold rather than waiting for a child or parent to file a report, surfacing a child in acute distress to the responsible adult or authority without creating a feed of message content, and enabling platforms subject to duty-of-care obligations to demonstrate that they have taken reasonable steps to prevent foreseeable harm before it materialises.