Australia's digital duty of care reforms

The Australian Federal Government released the exposure draft of the Online Safety Amendment Digital Duty of Care Bill 2026 on 8 September 2026, with public consultation closing 22 September 2026. The proposed legislation would introduce a statutory digital duty of care for online service providers, requiring them to assess and mitigate foreseeable harms, protect children from harmful content and addictive features, and offer non-algorithmic feeds, with enforcement by the eSafety Commissioner including fines of nearly 110 million Australian dollars and removal powers for nudify apps and websites.

Detection of grooming, sextortion and CSAM threats in children's direct-message conversations operates at a different layer than platform-level design obligations. Guardii, backed by Startmate, monitors the shape and seriousness of a conversation across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, Roblox and other platforms, flagging sustained targeting, escalation and coercion rather than handing anyone a feed of what was said, surfacing a child in crisis to a parent, school or professional and enabling rapid escalation to the right authority. Where a duty of care framework addresses the structural features platforms must offer, targeted real-time pattern detection addresses the individual threat a child faces right now, detecting hostile contact before it reaches the target and reporting the risk without waiting for a regulatory investigation.