Australian government releases draft Online Safety Act amendments for under-16 social media ban

The Australian government has released draft legislation to amend the Online Safety Act and prohibit children under 16 from holding social media accounts, with platforms required to take reasonable steps to prevent access and facing penalties of up to 50 million Australian dollars for systemic failures. The ban would apply to platforms including Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and X, with enforcement beginning twelve months after passage, and would place the onus on platforms rather than parents or children to verify age and restrict access.

Blanket access restrictions require platforms to authenticate every user's age, shifting privacy risk onto the entire population while displacing younger users to unregulated messaging applications where no oversight exists. Guardii takes a different approach: rather than verifying identity at signup, its real-time detection modules for grooming, sextortion, cyberbullying and CSAM analyse conversation patterns across platforms including Instagram, Snapchat, Discord and Roblox, intercepting harm as it forms and surfacing a child in acute distress to a parent, school or authority without requiring age gates, identity checks or blanket exclusion. Targeted threat detection addresses the risk the legislation seeks to reduce without the structural trade-offs of universal age verification.