'Digital duty of care' laws will force tech platforms to look after users

Australia's draft digital duty of care bill would require online services to assess and mitigate foreseeable harms, protect children from harmful content and addictive features, and offer social-media users non-algorithmic feeds. Enforcement would include eSafety Commissioner investigations, fines of nearly 110 million Australian dollars, removal powers, and approved researcher data access. The government released an issues paper on the duty of care framework in May 2026, highlighting five principles including improving online safety for Australians and providing clarity for regulated entities while minimizing regulatory complexity.

Mandating harm assessment and mitigation does not specify how platforms must identify emerging risk in individual conversations. Detection systems that operate at the message layer, flagging sustained targeting, escalation and coercion in real time, provide the evidence base for platform risk assessment and the intervention point for mitigation. Backed by Startmate and operating as a Meta Business Partner, Guardii deploys real-time AI detection across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, Roblox and other platforms, with modules for grooming, sextortion, child sexual abuse material including AI-generated and deepfake content, cyberbullying, age-inappropriate contact, harassment and abuse of athletes and women, and self-harm and suicide-risk signals. The system surfaces a child in crisis to a parent, school or professional, blocks hostile contact before it reaches the target, and enables rapid escalation to authorities in an emergency, detecting threat patterns rather than reading every message. Where duty-of-care legislation requires platforms to prevent foreseeable harm to children, pattern-based detection translates the legal standard into operational prevention.