Australia is drawing up a roadmap for regulating social media. Is it one other countries should follow?
A phone screen asks a user to opt in for a social media algorithm. (Illustration by News Decoder)
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A global battle has begun to give users more control over internet content providers and the algorithms that drive what we see on our laptops and cellphones. Australia is leading the fight.
In 2024 it became the first country to ban social media for children — a move subsequently followed by some 20 countries. Australia’s Online Safety Bill of 2025, a social media ban on under-16s covers providers such as Snapchat, Instagram, X, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube.
“I want our children to be playing football or netball, making music or reading books, finding friends face-to-face,” Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said in New York while attending the UN General Assembly in September. “Put simply, we must give children back their childhood.”
The law gives Australian courts the power to impose civil penalties for platforms that don’t take reasonable steps to prevent underage users from having accounts. Fines for systematic breaches of the rules can reach A$99 million (US$69 million).
Now, Australia is following its under-16s’ ban with a new law aimed at protecting all users.
Shifting the responsibility
The Online Safety Amendment (Digital Duty of Care) Bill 2026 will legally shift the burden for ensuring safe online experiences from individual users to service providers.
The prime minister said it will give Australians choice over their online experience, which he dubbed: “My Feed, My Way.”
“Australia is leading the world with our social media age ban and online safety approach,” he said.
The Digital Duty of Care bill is expected to come into effect by the end of this year. It not only targets social media firms, but messaging services, many website operators, search engines, app stores and equipment providers tied to those services.
It also captures AI tools that let users generate and share content like AI-generated nude photographs.
Giving users the choice
The law will require operators to offer new and existing users a choice over their default feed. They can either ‘opt in’ to personalised content recommended by the algorithm, or, ‘opt out’ of any content in their default feed and just see the friends and creators they choose to follow.
“If enacted, the reforms would impose proactive obligations on a broad range of online service providers to prevent foreseeable digital harms and promote safer online environments,” said Veronica Scott, a partner at law firm Pinsent Masons.
Other countries have also been pursuing digital safety laws, including the UK’s Online Safety Act and the European Union’s Digital Services Act. However, Australia’s latest move to a digital duty of care is to operate alongside upcoming Privacy Act changes and a new Children’s Online Privacy Code, making it more significant.
A report by lawyers for leading international law firm Allens found that these laws fundamentally shift how Australia regulates its online environment from co-regulation to direct regulation.
“The reforms will require online providers to reassess (and for some providers, assess for the first time) the risk of harm arising from the use of their service, particularly harm to children,” the report said.
Sock puppets and e-safety
Penalties for failing to comply will be sizeable, with maximum fines of around A$110 million, (about US$75 million), depending on how serious the breach.
Even more far reaching, the Duty of Care bill will allow government-approved researchers and Australia’s e-safety regulator to use so-called ‘sock puppet’ accounts to test services and check compliance.
Generally, a sock puppet account is a false or fictitious identity used in online accounts to deceive people. In this case, these accounts would be used by regulators to check whether online providers are complying with the new law.
That’s a step too far for many. As lawyers at Allens noted: “The reforms have already drawn sharp criticism, including from U.S. President Donald Trump, whose administration warned it would likely view the laws as ‘facilitating censorship’.”
Albanese, when asked about Trump’s criticism, said: “It’s not about giving government control. It’s about giving people back control over what they receive on their devices.”
Australia’s online safety and AI-governance is also back in the spotlight after a separate development where an AI agent infiltrated an Australian Government Medicare website.
The government had already announced in mid-July this year that it planned robust new AI laws to enforce mandatory minimum requirements for large data centres to protect national security.
After the breaching of Medicare’s cybersecurity defences by OpenAI’s ChatGPT agent — a world first — it’s likely the Albanese Government will look to strengthen AI governance.
“We want to make sure that we shape AI rather than AI shaping us,” Albanese said. “Put simply, humans must remain in control.”
Questions to consider:
1. Who should control what you see on your mobile phone or laptop?
2. Why is a country with no major social media companies like Australia emerging as a leader of technology regulation?
3. In what ways do you think governments should regulate the content you can access on the Internet?
Richard Hubbard is a finance and economics journalist with more than 35 years reporting from Australia, the UK, Asia and the United States. He is currently a freelance journalist based in Sydney. Hubbard covered the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s from Hong Kong and Singapore, and later the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath from London.