Australia’s authorities will work with states and territories to legislate new age limits for social media web sites, as a part of a push to guard kids’s psychological well being and defend them from inappropriate content material on-line.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will introduce the brand new legal guidelines earlier than an election due throughout the subsequent 9 months, saying mother and father have been working “with no map” to try to deal with the psychological well being penalties triggered by social media.
“No era has confronted this problem earlier than,” Albanese will say in a speech on Tuesday, in response to excerpts offered by his workplace upfront. “Too typically, there’s nothing social about social media—taking youngsters away from actual mates and actual experiences.”
No particular age restrict has been set but for social media, with the federal government already trialling age assurance know-how to limit kids’s entry to inappropriate content material on-line, together with pornography. The federal government can also be nonetheless consulting on how the ban would work in follow.
Albanese instructed Australian Broadcasting Corp. on Tuesday that the federal government was contemplating an higher age restrict of 14 to 16 years for the ban.
“We’re taking a look at the way you ship it. It is a international difficulty that governments across the globe are attempting to take care of,” he mentioned.
A June survey by Important Media discovered that 68% of Australians have been supportive of an age restrict of social media, with solely 15% opposed.
Since coming to energy in Could 2022, the center-left Labor authorities has taken a number of steps to attempt to crack down on issues related to dangerous content material on-line. Within the first half of 2024, it took social media platform X to court docket in an try and drive it to take away footage of a violent terrorist assault in Sydney.
