The government’s primary reason for imposing social media age limits is to protect children, so Anthony Albanese says.
The proposed new laws carry enormous penalties for big tech companies that don’t ensure compliance. Fines going into the tens of millions of dollars for breaches.
But if the primary purpose of these new laws is to protect children when they go online, why won’t the government include online pornography sites in the legislative ark?
The original laws were going to include YouTube before a backlash saw that video sharing site excluded.
The laws will apply to the likes of Facebook Snapchat and Twitter, all of which include the capacity to share videos as well as message.
But as Nationals Senator Matt Canavan was asking in senate hearings, what about Pornhub?
The online video sharing pornography site has next to no protections preventing children access to some pretty disturbing and graphic video content.
All you have to do is click a button confirming that you’re over 18. No checks are required, no providing evidence to confirm your age.
If Labor is really serious about the end goal of protecting n children from harmful content online, it is pretty hard to understand why banning social media sites matters but allowing free accessibility to Pornhub is fine and dandy.
Senator Canavan pressed the ACMA representative fronting his senate committee as to why the laws didn’t restrict and oversee Pornhub.
‘We wouldn’t see Pornhub as falling within the scope,’ he was told. ‘It’s not seen as a social media platform.’
But that doesn’t make it any less harmful to children. Nor does it mean the current accessibility settings are okay.
Why won’t Labor legislatively do anything about that? It boggles the mind.
The contradiction really does expose the vacuous nature of the government’s claims that these proposed social media laws are all about protecting the next generation from harm.
It exposes that they aren’t really all that serious about protecting kids from harmful online content.
What’s really going on here is Labor wants to appease traditional media companies who have a beef with big tech organisations like X (formerly known as Twitter) and Meta for other reasons.
Perhaps in the hope that grateful legacy media businesses will show their appreciation come the election campaign.
That might also be why the Coalition is supporting the new laws, guaranteeing their passage through parliament this side of new year.
In fact Peter Dutton has been quick to claim Labor stole this policy from his back pocket when it was first announced, echoing sentiments he’d previously shared publicly.
Labor is always trying to balance between its right and left flanks.
Perhaps it doesn’t want to protect n children from harmful pornography – by tightening age restrictions to involve more than clicking a button to confirm you’re over 18 – because doing so will cause ructions in sections of the left.
Whatever the reason, for Labor to be so incurious as to rush these social media laws through the parliament, rather than expand their scope to more seriously protect children from harmful content like Pornhub, is borderline neglectful.
Ask any parent what they think is more harmful to their children’s well being: easy access to graphic online pornography, or easy access to a messaging system that largely mirrors text messaging, and you know what the answers will be.
Yet here we are. Labor allowed all of one day for community consultation for its new social media laws, such was its disregard for feedback before pressing ahead.
When questioning why Pornhub hasn’t been included in the ambit of the proposed legislation, Senator Canavan told his senate committee: ‘It’s very vague and unclear to any reasonable person about what’s in and what’s out’.
Indeed it is.