Michael Swinson, Kate Creighton-Selvay, Kai Nash, Whye Yen Tan and Joshua Hu share details of social media minimum age legislation rapidly passed by the Australian government.
Tell me in a minute
The Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024 (Bill) has been passed by Parliament a mere eight days after being introduced (see our previous article on the Bill here).
The Bill was passed with minor amendments to prohibit social media platforms from collecting government-issued ID or information from a user’s digital ID[1] for the purpose of enforcing the minimum age requirement unless reasonable alternative age assurance options are provided. If a service provider fails to provide reasonable alternative age assurance mechanisms, it will be subject to civil penalties of up to 150,000 penalty units (currently $49.5 million).
These amendments were introduced in response to concerns regarding the potential overcollection of information by social media platforms, and are designed to ensure that users cannot be compelled to provide government identification or their digital ID for age assurance purposes.
The Minister has also been given powers to make legislative rules to further exclude other kinds of information from being collected and used by social media platforms for the purpose of age assurance.
What’s next?
Once the Bill receives Royal Assent, social media providers covered by the legislation will have 12 months to develop and implement the systems necessary to comply with the age-restriction obligations. The Government will continue to monitor the effectiveness of the legislation, with a mandatory independent review to be conducted within 2 years of the minimum age requirement taking effect.
As we previously covered, the Government has also signalled its intention to legislate a statutory Digital Duty of Care to ensure that social media providers continue to identify and mitigate potential risks as technology and service offerings change and evolve. There have been no further updates on this point, though more should be known once the Government tables the recently completed review of the Online Safety Act (hopefully when Parliament returns next year). Stakeholders will also be keeping a close eye on the age assurance technology trial, which will inform what ‘reasonable steps’ social media service providers may need to adopt in order to comply with the age assurance obligations. Amongst other things, the Government has indicated that the trial will cover: age verification, age estimation, age inference, parental certification or controls, technology stack deployments and technology readiness assessments in the Australian context.