A dominant theme of the hastily written submissions to the federal government’s one-day review of its social-media ban bill is that the process is far too rushed to consider its wide-ranging effects on all Australians.
A year from now, every Australian logging on to Facebook, Instagram or TikTok may be confronted with a prompt that the company is requiring you to prove your age.
But even that is just speculation.
The bill that was introduced into parliament last week, and sent off to a committee for a single day – receiving over 15,000 submissions – contains no details about how it will work, only that the companies will be expected to take reasonable steps to ensure users are aged 16 and over.
The actual detail will come later, through the completion of a trial of age-assurance technology in mid-2025. Then, through expansive powers, the minister for communications will determine what methods will be used and to which platforms they’re applied.
Michelle Rowland’s Labor predecessor in the communications portfolio, Stephen Conroy, once said he had “unfettered legal power” and could make telecommunications companies “wear red underpants on [their] head” if he wanted. The social media sector might wonder if this is where these new powers may go.
Elon Musk’s X has warned that these new powers could be weaponised by a minister, and could limit free speech. X and the Human Rights Law Centre have both raised questions over the lawfulness of the bill.
We’re told in media interviews which platforms are in and which are out – such as YouTube – but that will be up to the minister to decide at a later date.
The government has been at pains to say people won’t be required to prove their age via the government’s new digital ID, or that they will be required to hand over licences or passports to every social media platform. But there’s nothing in the legislation today preventing that.
That was one of the key takeaways from the short four-hour hearing on the bill on Monday. It came after a question from one of the few sceptics of the legislation from the two major parties: the Liberal National party senator, Matt Canavan.
However, the Coalition indicated on Tuesday it had secured agreement from government for amendments to the bill to prevent people being forced to hand over IDs to social media platforms.
TikTok has said any requirement to hand over IDs is tantamount to requiring every social media user in Australia to have a licence to access social media.
Having read through the vast bulk of the publicly available written submissions, it’s clear that most experts believe this is an ill thought-through policy which lacks evidentiary basis, likely won’t work, and will have wide-ranging ramifications for every social media user in Australia.
One of the authors of the only major study on the effects of social media on teen mental health cited by the government doesn’t back the government’s ban.
At the Monday hearing, there was only one witness in favour of the bill – and she had campaigned for it well before today. Everyone else who wasn’t a government agency or one of the politicians asking the questions was against the ban.
It appears the legislation will fly through parliament after a week of consideration.
Just over a year ago, in the wake of several high-profile data breaches, the government had suggested age-assurance raised too many privacy and security concerns for every Australian. Guardian Australia has revealed the eSafety commissioner’s own position has previously been that no country has been able to solve this problem.
Nothing substantial in the technology has changed since then. So why the change?
It appears to be the result of a combination of a months-long wedge from the opposition pushing the government to adopt the policy, public polling backing the ban, and a News Corp campaign that – in a Deidre Chambers-style coincidence – just happened to launch not long after Meta announced it would not enter into new deals to pay for news.
On Tuesday, News Corp’s tabloid front pages across the major cities and an editorial in the Australian urged the parliament to pass the bill.
Passing the bill now, and it not coming into effect until after the next election serves two purposes: it takes it off the table as an election issue; and it puts responsibility for implementation onto the next government.
The concern over the bill from members of parliament has seen odd pairings: the Greens, One Nation, some teals, and others such as Gerard Rennick, and Coalition MPs who already had concerns over the eSafety commissioner’s powers. Some want more regulation to make the platforms safer for everyone, others want the digital public square to be more free of regulation. But on this at least they’re a unity ticket.
However, they will probably not have the numbers to stop this going through before the end of this week.
