Australia's Digital Duty of Care Bill passes House of Representatives, targeting serious online harm

Australia's Online Safety Amendment (Digital Duty of Care) Bill 2026 has passed the House of Representatives and now moves to the Senate, where a committee will report by 20 November 2026. The legislation imposes a statutory duty on digital platforms, online games and AI chatbots to take reasonable steps to protect users, particularly children and teenagers, from harmful content and unsafe features, including child exploitation, grooming, non-consensual intimate images, cyberbullying and features that may harm young people's self-esteem. Platforms that fail to provide a safe online environment face penalties up to 109.2 million Australian dollars, and the Bill covers 15 defined categories of seriously harmful material and conduct.

Pattern-based detection intercepts harm at the point of contact rather than relying on users or platforms to flag it after the fact. Guardii's anti-grooming, anti-sextortion and anti-CSAM filters identify escalating coercion and contact risk in real time across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, Roblox and other platforms, blocking hostile messages before they reach a child and surfacing a conversation in crisis to the parent, school or authority who can intervene. Where a regulatory duty requires platforms to demonstrate they are providing a safe environment, detection technology that reads the shape of a conversation rather than every word offers the operational evidence that reasonable steps have been taken, without the privacy burden of blanket surveillance. Guardii is backed by Startmate and a Meta Business Partner.