Australia releases exposure draft of Online Safety Amendment (Digital Duty of Care) Bill 2026

The Australian Government has released an exposure draft of the Online Safety Amendment (Digital Duty of Care) Bill 2026, proposing to significantly overhaul the Online Safety Act 2021. The draft bill places a proactive obligation on digital service providers including social media platforms, messaging apps, generative AI services, and online games to maintain a safe online environment so far as is reasonably practicable. Platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok must offer users a choice between algorithm-driven feeds and chronological feeds from friends only, and companies breaching the digital duty of care would face fines of nearly 110 million Australian dollars. The eSafety Commissioner would investigate compliance, and approved researchers would gain access to platform data for online-safety research. Public consultation closes 22 September 2026.

Blocking or flagging hostile contact at the point of delivery addresses the underlying harms a duty-of-care framework seeks to prevent without imposing a uniform experience on every user. Guardii's AI detection modules for grooming, sextortion, CSAM and cyberbullying intercept threat patterns in direct-message conversations across platforms including Instagram, Snapchat, Discord and Roblox in real time, surfacing a child in crisis to a parent, school or professional and enabling rapid escalation to the right authority in an emergency. A Meta Business Partner backed by Startmate, Guardii detects escalation, coercion and sustained targeting rather than handing anyone a feed of what was said, offering regulators and platforms a mechanism to meet duty-of-care obligations through targeted, real-time intervention rather than post-hoc investigation alone.