Associate Professor Daniel Joyce
On 10 December 2025 age-related restrictions on social media will come into effect, impacting large numbers of Australian teenagers online, and raising questions about how best to balance the need to protect young people from the harms associated with social media while also accounting for their rights, including free speech and privacy.
While framed by critics as a ‘ban’, these restrictions target designated social media platforms. The relevant part 4A of the Online Safety Act aims ‘to reduce the risk of harm to age – restricted users from certain kinds of social media platforms’. In any future constitutional challenge, this object would be balanced against the burden placed on young people’s implied freedom of political communication.
The interesting thing about the way the ban is created is that it talks of risk of harm to a category of children and targets the social media platforms themselves, rather than these children or their parents. The eSafety Commissioner has also emphasised these measures as being necessary in order to fulfil Australia’s commitment to children’s rights. But the impact on free speech is likely to be significant – especially as social media is now widely used as a central means of accessing news and all forms of political communication. There are also concerns that the regulatory intervention will not work.
Social media when first developed was heralded as an exciting and empowering tool to connect, communicate and protect rights. It was envisaged as a digital infrastructure that would revive the public sphere and politics, ushering in new forms of participation. But dominant social media platforms have since developed as for-profit entities with their own agendas and goals, sometimes aligning with human rights frameworks, but often driving commodification of public life, disrupting the news economy and eroding rights such as privacy in order to generate profit and power. In some cases, social media platforms have been connected to extreme violations of rights as in Facebook’s role in the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar. Scandals like this, and concerns over electoral manipulation exemplified by the Cambridge Analytica revelations, focused more critical attention on digital platforms.
For a period of time it seemed that the Meta Oversight Board (aka the Supreme Court of Facebook) offered its own responsive model of social media self-governance with real opportunities for human rights engagement and that it might become the norm for all social media companies. But fast forward to the present day and Silicon Valley has distanced itself from an earlier embrace of human rights and from earlier apologies for violations. It is in this context that we must assess the experimentation and risks involved with these new age-based restrictions on social media. Encouraging corporate social responsibility remains an important avenue, but self-regulation has its own limitations.
My media law students here at UNSW often reflect on how they have been let down both by private companies and by the state when it comes to the absence of social media governance. The federal government should be acknowledged for trying to re-engage with an area of regulatory policy that mostly been seen to be too hard or inhibiting of digital economic opportunities and geopolitical relationships.
That is not to say that these laws are perfect, or indeed that they will work 100 per cent of the time. Rather these new laws remind us of the continuing need to experiment with both public and private governance models for social media, and of the complex balancing of rights involved. Human rights frameworks and approaches continue to provide important guidance and limits in navigating the opportunities involved with disruptive technologies such as social media.
Associate Professor Daniel Joyce is an Australian Human Rights Institute Associate and Associate Dean (Research) at UNSW Law and Justice.