Spies, cops back in social media crackdown

Mandatory age verification would significantly help Australia’s police and intelligence agencies keep social media safer for kids, their chiefs say, as the government confirms it is a “very live issue” being considered.

ASIO director general Mark Burgess said age verification would “help my job” and help with the problem more broadly, while AFP Commissioner Reece Kershaw said it was a matter for government policy makers.

After months of lobbying from the Coalition, Communications Minister Michelle Rowland on Wednesday said age verification was being considered by the government with the eSafety commissioner.

Although she admitted there was “no silver bullet” to fixing the loophole, Ms Rowland said her department was considering what could be done to ensure a child couldn’t access a site by lying about how old they were.

Social media platforms like Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram, as well as X (formerly Twitter), do have age limits of at least 13 years old, but as Ms Rowland conceded, there was a “problem in getting them to enforce it”.

“Age limitations is indeed some of the issues being examined right now as part of the online safety review,” Ms Rowland said.

“No one wants vulnerable people, especially children, seeing certain content that is not age appropriate.”

Spies, cops back in social media crackdown

Speaking at the National Press Club, Commissioner Kershaw said his agency had personally appealed to social media companies and other electronic service providers to “work with us to keep our kids safe”.

“As a parent, back in the olden days and still today, you go to the playground and you make sure your kids are safe,” he said.

“If you are going to that particular playground, you watch them and make sure they stay safe.

“It is not a dissimilar strategy with the internet in the sense that you have to be connected into your child and see what they are doing on the internet.”

Ms Rowland had earlier admitted there would be difficulties in enforcing age limitations, while her Coalition counterpart David Coleman doubled down on his calls for the government to “get on with it”.

“People will always try and get around rules and that’s why you have eSafety to go through the process,” Mr Coleman said.

“I think that yes, there’s complexity, but to be frank, the social media companies use that complexity to their advantage to throw up red flags as why nothing should happen.

“And what we have to do is have the intellectual clarity and strength to see through that … What do we care about?”

Mr Coleman said just like Australia enforced a classification system for movies, games and TV shows to protect children from inappropriate content, the same idea should be extended to social media.

“What we’ve got to do is get on with it, back our eSafety commissioner who wants to get on with this, and stop delaying it,” he said.

Ms Rowland said the government was looking at “every method to make sure that we keep, especially children and other vulnerable cohorts, safe”.

And, amid a legal stoush between social media giant X and the Australian eSafety commissioner over graphic videos from the alleged terror stabbing of a Western Sydney bishop still on the platform, she called on the Coalition to show bipartisanship on tackling mis- and disinformation.

“This is a threat to democratic institutions. It is a threat when we see the kinds of harms that we saw in Western Sydney, where mis- and disinformation meant that police officers on duty were put in the line of harm,” Ms Rowland said.

“A riot essentially was instigated, public property was damaged as result of the proliferation of platforms who are not enforcing their own systems and processes.”