The Greens are backing government amendments to strengthen the eSafety Commissioner’s powers to enforce Australia’s under-16 social media restrictions, as the Senate votes on the legislation.
The bill would give the eSafety Commissioner greater powers to require technology platforms to provide evidence showing how they are complying with the social media age restrictions.
The government has presented the changes as measures to strengthen the regulator’s ability to obtain information from platforms, including documents that could help establish whether companies are meeting their obligations.
The Greens are supporting the government amendments, while the Coalition is opposing them. The Coalition says the separate bill giving the eSafety Commissioner extra powers gives the commissioner and government too much discretion, and argues that freedom of speech must be protected alongside efforts to protect children from online harm.
The opposition has also linked its concerns about the eSafety powers to the separate Digital Duty of Care bill. It says the two measures raise similar concerns about ministerial and regulatory discretion, although they are separate bills.
Opposition Leader Angus Taylor said the Coalition did not support giving strong, unfettered powers to the minister, government or eSafety Commissioner. He said protecting children and Australians from undue harm could not come at the expense of what he described as political censorship.
Liberal senator Sarah Henderson, discussing the Digital Duty of Care bill separately, said she had no confidence that the government would remove what she regarded as the most problematic parts of the draft. She described the proposed powers as open-ended and said there were no safeguards.
Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young said greater transparency was needed because technology companies could otherwise keep information about their systems and algorithms secret.
“It’s very hard, of course, to implement any of these rules if these companies can keep their tricks and tactics locked down in secret,” Hanson-Young said, arguing that there needed to be greater transparency about what is happening inside the platforms’ algorithms.
Australia’s social media minimum-age restrictions came into effect on 10 December 2025, requiring age-restricted platforms to take reasonable steps to prevent Australians under 16 from having accounts. The eSafety Commissioner is responsible for enforcing compliance with the rules.
Source: The Guardian
