Australian Government Announces Plan to Ban Social Media for Under-16s

The Australian government on 10 September 2024 confirmed it will introduce legislation before the end of the year to ban social media access for children under 16, with age-verification requirements to be enforced on platforms rather than parents. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese stated that the measure is intended to protect children from online harms including bullying, predatory behaviour and exposure to harmful content, and that platforms will face penalties for non-compliance. The proposal follows a trial of age-verification technologies commissioned by the government and places Australia among a small group of jurisdictions pursuing blanket age-based access restrictions rather than targeted harm-reduction measures.

Age-verification mandates that restrict access uniformly assume that exclusion reduces risk, but offenders who seek out children often migrate to less-regulated or encrypted platforms where visibility is lower and intervention is harder. Systems that detect harmful patterns within conversations allow children who do use social platforms to do so with real-time protection, flagging grooming, sextortion or sustained harassment to parents, schools or authorities before escalation, and without requiring every user to surrender identity documents. Guardii's anti-grooming and anti-sextortion detection operates across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, Roblox and other services used by young people, identifying coercion and sexual solicitation through conversational dynamics rather than keywords, surfacing a child in crisis to the adults responsible for their safety, and offering a mechanism to address the underlying threat without the privacy trade-offs or displacement effects that accompany universal age-gating.