Key facts and figures

• Under the Digital Duty of Care legislation, online platforms would be legally responsible for keeping Australians safe on their services.
• Platforms that fail to comply could face penalties of up to $109.2 million, with the eSafety Commissioner responsible for enforcement.

Policy Landscape

Breaking down the reforms  

Which platforms are covered?

Almost all of them. The Bill covers social media, messaging apps, search engines, app stores, websites, hosting services and internet providers. It also covers AI tools that let users generate and share content, and companies which make or supply devices used to access these services. Under the proposed legislation, the Minister can exempt services that are deemed to pose little risk or are used minimally in Australia.

What would platforms have to do?

Platforms must take “appropriate action to ensure a safe online environment”, including “effective measures” to mitigate the risks identified in their risk assessments.

The Exposure Draft framed this as a duty to act “so far as is reasonably practicable”, a test borrowed from workplace health and safety laws. However, the Bill takes a different approach. To decide whether a platform’s measures are appropriate and effective, consideration will be given to how far they achieve a safe environment, the nature of the harm, the impact on the service’s security, and whether they are proportionate to the likelihood and severity of the harm.

Risk assessments would have to identify foreseeable risks and the content, design features and systems that create them. They would also need to record how effective the mitigation measures are expected to be and for how long. Platforms would need a new assessment before making any significant change that could introduce new risks.

Who does it protect and from what?

Under the Bill, everyone in Australia would be protected from "seriously harmful" material and conduct. This includes child sexual abuse material, grooming, threats of violence, content promoting suicide or self-harm, terrorist content and content promoting illicit drug use.

Children under 18 would receive extra protection from five categories of material and conduct considered harmful to children:

• Pornography
• Content that promotes disordered eating
• Content that promotes hostile attitudes towards women or gender equality
• Content that glorifies crime or encourages dangerous stunts
• Abuse, harassment or bullying.

For children under 16, social media platforms would have to ensure, so far as reasonably practicable, that the following design features do not operate, including when a child is using the platform without an account:

• Recommended systems that select content based on a user's account
• Endless feeds
• Feedback features such as likes and view counts
• Time-limited content such as disappearing stories
• Features that are only available when logged in.

The duty would not apply to lawful private communications between consenting adults.

What is ‘My Feed, My Way’?

‘My Feed, My Way’ is the Government's plan for users aged 16 and over. Platforms would have to notify new and existing users and ask them to choose their default feed: one driven by personalised recommendations, or one showing only the friends and creators they follow.

"This is not about giving government control. It's about giving people control. It's about putting choice back into the hands of Australians online." – Prime Minister the Hon. Anthony Albanese MP

The initiative is not named in the Bill. Instead, the Bill requires platforms to provide "user empowerment tools", which let users control how design features work for them, such as what content is recommended. The Minister would decide which tools are required through a legislative instrument.

How would it be enforced?

The eSafety Commissioner would enforce the duty, with penalties of up to $109.2 million.  

The Bill also gives the Commissioner new powers to look inside platforms. For example, the Commissioner could demand information on how algorithms recommend and moderate content, require transparency reports, examine people on oath and test services using fictitious “sock puppet” accounts.

Key Challenges

Who decides the rules

The Minister’s power to define harm was the centre of the political debate over the proposed legislation. Opposition Leader Angus Taylor has called it a “blank cheque for political censorship” and Liberal Senator Sarah Henderson has described it as a “backdoor way” to revive Labor’s abandoned misinformation and disinformation bill.  

One Nation Leader Senator Pauline Hanson has said Australia should be moving away from government censorship, “not building the Orwellian machinery for it”.

The Minister for Communications, the Hon. Anika Wells MP, said she was open to Parliament deciding what meets the threshold, and the Bill now does that; changing the categories of serious harm would require amending the Act.

The Bill still leaves some decisions to the Minister by legislative instrument. These include which design features count as harmful for under 16s, which services count as social media, which services are exempt, and what user empowerment tools platforms must provide.  

The eSafety Commissioner would set the standards for risk assessments and complaints processes.

The Greens have welcomed the proposed reforms but want them to go further. They want algorithmic feeds switched off by default, a lower threshold for harm and penalties set as a share of global revenue.

“Opt out is not acceptable. Opt out is a recipe for big tech to manipulate and to get around it.” – Greens Communications Spokesperson, Senator Sarah Hanson-Young

Labor will need the support of either the Greens or the Coalition to pass the Bill in the Senate.

How the choice of feed is designed

The Bill leaves the detail of ‘My Feed, My Way’ to be determined later by legislative instrument. This will include what the alternative feed looks like, how the choice is presented and whether it lasts.

The European Union’s experience shows why that detail matters. Since 2023, its Digital Services Act has required the largest platforms to offer at least one feed that is not based on profiling.  

A 2025 investigation by Dutch digital rights group Bits of Freedom found that Facebook, TikTok and Snapchat all formally met this requirement. However, the platforms’ designs often made the non-profiled option hard to choose. On Facebook and Snapchat it sat on a separate page, and on TikTok it required tapping and holding on content. When users chose a non-profiled feed on Facebook, the platform switched back to the profiling-based feed once they closed and reopened the app.

In February 2026, the European Commission issued initial findings that TikTok had breached the DSA through addictive design, and said the platform would need to change the basic design of its service. It reached similar initial findings against Meta in July 2026. The Commission said Meta should disable autoplay and infinite scroll by default, build in real screen-time breaks and make its recommender system “less engagement-oriented”. Neither case has yet reached a final decision.

A potential US response

At the United Nations General Assembly in September, President Donald Trump rejected calls from Australia and other countries to regulate artificial intelligence, dismissing them as a “globalist scheme”. His Administration has been just as clear on the Digital Duty of Care.  

Shortly after the Exposure Draft was released, White House spokesperson Kush Desai said:

“President Trump has unequivocally warned trading partners against imposing digital services taxes, fines, and other forms of extortion on America’s leading technology sector.” – White House spokesperson, Kush Desai

On Tuesday 22 September 2026, the US Embassy in Canberra published a public submission that described the reforms as “extraterritorial censorship of protected speech” and asked Australia to exclude US social media companies. It objected to “rigid, one-size-fits-all platform design requirements” such as forced chronological feeds or opt-in recommendation systems.

The US Administration has acted on similar warnings before. In August 2025, President Trump threatened tariffs and chip export restrictions against countries with digital rules affecting US tech companies, and Canada, India and Indonesia each walked back their respective digital taxes or levies. In December 2025, the State Department barred former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton, an architect of the Digital Services Act, from entering the US.

York Park Group’s Thoughts

Technology policy is shaping up as a defining part of the Albanese Government’s legacy. Australia’s under-16 social media ban put the country at the front of a global debate, and other nations will be watching on if the Digital Duty of Care legislation is passed and its impact.

Given how common it is for relevant ads to surface on personal social media feeds following private conversations, it is evident that platforms listen and track everything and design algorithms to capture users’ attention.

While platforms may not create most of the content on their services, they are responsible for designing the technology that sits underneath the feeds, deciding what users see.

However, much of what the Digital Duty of Care is focused on is speech, and deciding what is ‘harmful’ means making subjective decisions about what could be deemed legitimate debate and discussion and sharing of views.

Walking back the proposed power for the Minister to define what constitutes harm removes the Bill’s most contentious element, however, if passed, this responsibility would be up to the Parliament, remaining equally complex – raising questions of what’s in bad taste and what content is appropriate for Australians to have access to.

Indeed, the Digital Duty of Care may be one of the most complex reforms the Albanese Government will try to introduce.

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