Australia’s teen social media ban won’t have “critical” online safety measures because of the government’s rush to meet its own self-imposed deadline, according to internal government comments.
Once parliament passed Anthony Albanese’s “world-first” plan late last year to make social media companies limit people under the age of 16 from having accounts, the law gave itself a year lead-in until the ban commenced.
With the December 10 deadline fast approaching, the federal government has continued to hammer out the details. Last month, it published the rules that determine which social media platforms will come under the ban.
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Now, internal Department of Communications emails tabled in parliament detail how government staff working on these rules said there “wouldn’t be adequate time” to implement advice from the government’s own online safety regulator about how to improve them.
A spokesperson for the Minister of Communications Anika Wells told Crikey that Wells would consider the suggested changes at the end of 2027 as part of the statutory review of the ban.
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The teen social media ban’s rules — officially called the Online Safety (Age-Restricted Social Media Platforms) Rules 2025 — lists a number of social media platforms that are exempted from the ban because of their purpose. For example, it exempts primarily “message, email, voice calling or video calling” platforms like WhatsApp.
There were two other exemptions proposed by eSafety commissioner Julie Inman Grant when she gave advice to the Wells on June 19, as required under the teen social media ban law.
One was to exclude “low-risk age-appropriate” platforms from the ban. These platforms are social media networks that were designed for children and didn’t have “harmful design features” like infinite scroll videos and push notifications. The other exemption was to set up a test to make sure any excluded service was successfully avoiding harms — dubbed a “second prong” of the exclusions.
These measures added flexibility to the teen social media ban. They allowed social media companies to potentially avoid the ban if they could release apps that wouldn’t harm children, and allowed the government to ban platforms that qualified for an exemption but presented a risk to young users.
While some of the eSafety commissioner’s other recommendations were accepted by the government — most prominently the suggestion to remove a suggested exemption for YouTube — these two weren’t.
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Emails from Department of Communications staffers and from Wells’ office show support for the idea.
An early response from the department on July 25 to the eSafety commissioner’s recommendations lists both suggestions as “agree to consider at a later date”. The reason given for the delay is that they are a “complex undertaking which will be best considered within the legislated two-year review of the minimum age framework”.
A later email, on July 2, reiterates that the recommendations are “complex and will need careful consideration and design”. The department staffer’s email adds that “rushing through [the design] process would attract criticism”.
Department staffers appear to have told the eSafety commissioner that they wouldn’t agree to the recommendations because of time constraints.
Inman Grant mentioned this in an email to Minister Well’s office after meeting with the department. “They thought there wouldn’t be adequate time to build in the second risk-based prong into the rules,” she said in a July 25 email.
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The eSafety commissioner said this was a “concern” and even offered her office’s resources to help draft the change: “From my perspective, this is critical from an enforceability perspective … We at eSafety are willing to muck-in on the drafting, if it helps, but I think having a robust second prong that is risks- and harms-based protects the minister as well.”
The offer to help with drafting was not taken up, with the minister’s office instead accepting stop-gap recommendations also offered by the eSafety commissioner. These “short term” solution offered to include information about harmful features in the explanatory document for the ban’s rules, and to monitor the ban’s implementation for challenges.
“We note that eSafety intends to take a risk-based approach to enforcing compliance and agree this prioritisation represents a good regulatory approach,” the department said in a June 26 email.
The minister’s spokesperson said: “eSafety noted in their advice that an appropriate alternative to implementing recommendation 3 would be to adopt a combination of recommendations 2 and 5, which we have done.”
“Exempt platforms will still be subject to the important protections for younger people under the Online Safety Act and the National Classification Scheme.”
A spokesperson for the eSafety commissioner said that Inman Grant’s advice to the minister “specifically identified the possibility of the risked-based approach being a longer-term option, noting it was critical the rules be made as soon as possible.”
“A risk-based approach will also enable eSafety to focus on exposure and harm in assessing services, not just how the platform describes its purpose or audience size,” they told Crikey.
Eschewing these recommendations to the law is the latest in a series of rushed decisions made by the government while passing the teen social media ban.
Other internal documents from the Department of Communications obtained by Crikey revealed the frantic, last-minute policy-making process of the law, which left mistakes in public documents and eleventh-hour changes to the law itself.
A section of the original Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) bill that was similar to the eSafety commissioner’s shelved recommendations was taken out at last minute because of a deal between Labor and the Liberals.
