Welcome everyone to the Murarrie Recreation Reservation this morning and particularly a warm welcome to Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, Minister Wells and of course our eSafety Commissioner. I am so happy and delighted to have the Prime Minister here this morning to be talking about our social media ban. As a mum of three young kids who are below the age of the ban, I can tell you that the last five weeks of school holidays have been fantastic for me and my family to enjoy time together without social media and also one week to go of school holidays and I'm looking forward to spending more time in beautiful places like this right here in my electorate. I now want to hand over to the Prime Minister to say a few words.
ANTHONY ALBANESE, PRIME MINISTER: Well, thanks very much Kara and thanks for the difference that you're making in this local community here as the still relatively new Member for Bonner as such a strong advocate bringing the skills that you developed in local government to the national Parliament and representing this fantastic area of Brisbane.
It is great to be back in Queensland, although yesterday of course I was in Clermont following my visit to Cloncurry last week. Queenslanders are still suffering from the impacts of the floods and our thoughts are with the communities, particularly in the North West who are facing some really difficult conditions today.
A little more than a month ago Australia took action to protect our kids, to give kids back their childhood and to give parents peace of mind to make sure that social media companies understood that they had a social responsibility. The decision to ban social media for under 16s was world leading legislation. It passed the Parliament in a bipartisan manner and we spent one year making sure that we got the details right. I'm joined today by the Minister responsible, Anika Wells, but also the eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant who's been doing such a fantastic job overseeing the implementation of this policy.
Today we can announce that this is working. 4.7 million accounts gone. Suspended. Stopped. Meaning that young people, instead of being on their devices during these school holidays, have been cycling around facilities such as this. Have been reading books, have been engaging with their friends and family on a one to one basis. Interacting. Making an enormous difference to them. It has given as well parents that peace of mind and not worrying about what their children are looking at or online, whether they're being kept safe online because we know that there are real risks that has occurred.
We know that it's been difficult for some - change is. And that's why we as well have provided increased mental health support including the more than a billion dollars we've allocated to mental health programs. $700 million of that is aimed at young people in particular because we understand that this will be a difficult period.
I want to say as well that this is a source of Australian pride. This was world leading legislation, but is now being followed up around the world. The latest government to announce changes being the government of France led by President Emmanuel Macron. But that follows action in Indonesia, in Malaysia, European governments looking at these changes, some of the state governments in the United States as well, all taking action.
This is a grassroots campaign as well that occurred. People who had lost their loved ones, their young son or daughter, to the harmful impact that social media can have in the most extreme examples. And they campaigned so strongly and I pay tribute to them once again for the work that they have done. I'm going to ask the Minister to make some comments, then the eSafety Commissioner, then we're happy to take some questions.
ANIKA WELLS, MINISTER FOR COMMUNICATIONS: Thank you, PM. This is an incredible Australian story and I am so proud to be the Minister for Communications working to the Prime Minister's vision after we have now seen the first numbers in. And with approximately 1.2 million Australians aged between 13 and 16, we now have the numbers to say that in the first week of our social media ban, 4.7 million accounts were deactivated, actioned, decommissioned. Those are incredible numbers. They said it couldn't be done, but Australia is showing just how we could do it. And I'm so proud to work for a Prime Minister who took on a huge reform, a world first, nobody else had done it.
We took a year to get the details right. We stared down everybody who said it couldn't be done. Some of the most powerful and rich companies in the world and their supporters. And now Australian parents can be confident that their kids can have their childhood back. They can discover and learn who they are before these platforms assume who they are. They can spend a summer making real world connections with each other, with their siblings, with their parents, skateboarding, writing, reading, art, music. I don't care what it is, but it's off the screen and discovering for themselves who they are and forging connections in the real world. 4.7 million reasons to celebrate an incredible Australian story.
The work goes on, obviously we said this would never be perfect and we will continue to do that work to improve these laws. But my priority as the Minister for Communications this year is the next tranche of world leading reforms in this space, which is the digital duty of care. You'll remember at the end of last year we opened consultation because we are really keen to understand what Australian citizens think social media platforms owe to us as a duty of care. What responsibilities do they owe to us online? We had 1,300 responses to that consultation. My department is currently working through those responses so that I can prepare legislation so that we can continue to be world leading in such an important area.
Now let me hand over to the eSafety Commissioner, a woman I'm very proud to work alongside. This has been difficult and complex work for more than a year for her, but for particularly the past six months together as we have delivered these reforms.
JULIE INMAN GRANT, ESAFETY COMMISSIONER: Thank you, Minister. Thank you, Prime Minister. As you've just heard, eSafety's early data shows that 4.7 million under 16 accounts have been deactivated or restricted. To put this in perspective, there are 2.5 million Australian children between the ages of 8 and 15 and last year we understood that 84 per cent of 8 to 12 year olds had accounts. So, the fact that we are pushing below that level will show us that the real impacts will not be measured just in days and weeks, but actually in terms of years and demonstration. It also shows that all of this preparatory work that we've done to get these in place and to really think about engaging with the platforms and how we wanted them to prioritise has worked. We said please focus on the deactivations first, but we expect continued improvement. We expect you to prevent recidivism so the creation of additional accounts, there are a range of signals that they can look at to prevent that from happening. To prevent circumvention of your own systems, but also through things like VPNs.
Of course we've also been following migrations of kids onto other platforms and what was really interesting is the biggest spike was actually before December 10th of the platforms that are actually subject to the social media minimum age. And then what we saw was other platforms such as Yope, Lemon8, CapCut. Both Lemon8 and CapCut are owned by ByteDance, who also owns TikTok. So, we're engaged with them. Both Lemon8 and Bluesky as well as Yubo, which is a French site, have assessed as being in. So it doesn't matter where these companies are domiciled, if the kids are there then they are going to be subject to these laws. The other thing to note is these migrations have shown a spike in downloads but not in usage. That's been very short lived. So, there is no real long term trends yet that we can say, but we're engaging.
And I just want to say to some that, we don't expect safety laws to eliminate every single breach. If we did, speed limits would have failed because people speed. Drinking limits would have failed because, believe it or not, some kids do get access to alcohol. So, if we apply this to the age limits here and maybe we flip the script a little bit, we're talking about preventing children from accessing technology, which is not what this is. What we're actually doing is we're preventing predatory social media companies from accessing our children. And we will be working on digital action plans so that we make sure that they're building their digital and algorithmic literacy into the years to come.
I'm happy to talk about Grok. We've just announced a second investigation into X AI, but we're also going to be implementing world leading, AI companion and chatbot restrictions in March of this year. So, while we're talking about social media today, we're thinking about how we protect young people from an even more potential catastrophic harms from AI. And with that, I'll leave it to questions.
PRIME MINISTER: Thanks very much, Julie, and thanks for the work that you're doing. Happy to take questions.
JOURNALIST: Prime Minister, have all ten social media platforms, are they all handing data over now? I'm not sure whether that's [Inaudible].
COMMISSIONER INMAN GRANT: Yes, all 10 of the companies are currently in compliance. We will send out a series of layered notices. So, we asked very basic questions and so, and that's a really important question because I've been asked why can't you break down the numbers? Companies like Meta have voluntarily shared how many they've taken down. But think of this as like a law enforcement investigation. You don't share evidence when you have active regulatory investigations. These need to stand up in a court of law and we also need to respect privilege and confidentiality. So, this is why we are releasing these numbers in aggregates where we can be transparent, we will.
You'll see two things coming from us in the near future. In February, we will be presenting our independent evaluation. We'll be posting that on the Open Science Network, and this will be a longitudinal evaluation. But we're also fielding research with parents and young people across the nation to see what their initial experience was.
The last thing I would say is if parents do have children who have under 16 who still have accounts, there are three things they can do. They can sit down with them - we've got tonnes of resources at our social media hub to talk them through and delete the apps themselves. If they want the platforms to know, and we've asked them specifically to have information flows for that. This allows them to know where they failed and then to improve their classifiers. We also have a forum at esafety.gov.au this provides us really valuable insights as to where platforms might be failing or where they may need to tighten or change the implementation of their age assurance technologies. So all of these options are welcome.
JOURNALIST: Are there any platforms in the crosshairs at the moment for not doing enough?
COMMISSIONER INMAN GRANT: Nope. All 10 are in compliance as of now.
JOURNALIST: And are we likely to get a further breakdown in the future?
COMMISSIONER INMAN GRANT: If it's not in the midst of a regulatory investigation, again, I have to collect evidence. It has to stand up in a court of law. Companies do have the ability to share information if they wish, but there are a number of companies that don't want us sharing this information. And the integrity of the investigation is always going to take precedence.
JOURNALIST: Commissioner, have you given any more consideration to the letter from Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Committee, to appear before Congress? Will you travel to the US for this?
COMMISSIONER INMAN GRANT: We're engaging with Chairman Jordan and the Committee and no determination has been made yet. But I think I'll defer to the Government. He's asked me questions about my regulatory role, but he also has expressed concerns about the policies and laws of this country of which I'm not the right person to, I guess, carry the water on those things.
JOURNALIST: Whether it's to testify or otherwise. Are you confident you can go back to the US without being harassed by the administration?
COMMISSIONER INMAN GRANT: We shall see.
JOURNALIST: Are these 4.7 million, are they at all over inflated with duplicate accounts or unused inactive accounts? And is calling this a success, but how do we know, I guess, if it's a success, if we don't know how many children under 16 were on social media to begin with? Like, does this ban cover 50 per cent? 70 per cent? I guess, sort of, what's the -
COMMISSIONER INMAN GRANT: Well, we did the baseline work with our Beyond the Screen Transparency Report in February and the pre work we did with all of the platforms. Knowing what we've done with our youth research is we know, for instance, more than 95 per cent of 8 to 15 year olds are on YouTube, so those numbers will be larger and so we expected a higher proportion of accounts to be restricted on that particular platform. I'm very confident these numbers are right, but we will continue to check. We have a whole range of research methods that we'll be looking at to make sure that the data that is given to us is right. And I'd also say that they know in our discussions with them that the next expectation is they are preventing recidivism, which means preventing people from using the same phones, the same IP addresses to create fake or imposter accounts. They have the age inference tools to be able to stop that. And we'll make sure that we're checking that they are doing so.
JOURNALIST: Do you think the facial recognition is working?
COMMISSIONER INMAN GRANT: I think a lot of these classifiers need to improve. So, we're also speaking to a number of the age verification vendors who have said when they compare it, say to the implementation that happened in the UK in late July around age assurance, that this is the smoothest implementation they've seen anywhere in the world. But for instance, Snap is using three different methods. They are using facial age estimation without a liveness test. So, we will be looking at whether or not that -
JOURNALIST: [Inaudible].
COMMISSIONER INMAN GRANT: Well no, I mean we've tested all of these technologies through the age assurance trial. What's really important is that these companies are deploying them in the right way. And if they don't have the right settings or they're setting the calibrations too high, that is where they're going to likely have false positives. We're asking them all these questions. We'll be sending out a range of layered notices. And as I said, we will be transparent as we can be when we can be in a way that won't compromise an investigation.
JOURNALIST: With the migration data, are you asking those extra companies now to also provide data to you? Whether it be compliance to these laws?
COMMISSIONER INMAN GRANT: Well, yes. I mean I think two or three of them already, Bluesky, Lemon8 and Yubo, have all self-assessed as being age restricted social media sites. So they will comply, and we're talking to them about what we expect in terms of compliance. We're talking about a, you know, a huge universe of potential platforms. We're a small team, by necessity we are going to focus where the preponderance of young people are - where there are more than 250,000 for instance, is one measure. A lot of the other smaller companies that we're looking at have about 100,000 users. And so this will continue to be a work in progress. We're not done by any means. I think it's worth noting that what we're looking at are systemic failures. We need to show that these companies aren't following the reasonable steps in their totality that we've set out for them. But thus far, I mean to have compliance with ten of the richest, most powerful companies in the world providing this data on time. And where we're testing, we're seeing that they're relatively accurate. But we'll continue poking holes and see what we can find.
PRIME MINISTER: I might just add to the answer about whether this has been a success or not. I'll make three points. Today we're releasing the macro figures of 4.7 million accounts shut down, deactivated, removed or restricted pretty quickly once this ban came in.
But more than one month on, I think there are three indicators. One is the feedback that we've had from parents saying, thank you for doing this, this has made a difference in our household. This is making a difference to our son or daughter. This is a really positive move. So that's the first thing. The second is from young people themselves. There's a lot of younger people that I've spoken to who speak about, 'gee, we wish that was in place when I was 13 or 14. It's making a difference to my younger brother or sister'. And it's also young people themselves saying 'thank you, I was not terribly happy when it was announced, but it's the right thing to do and I'm happy at it now as well'. So parents, young people themselves. And the third is the fact that in spite of some skepticism out there, it's working and being replicated now around the world. It is something that is a source of Australian pride.
JOURNALIST: Just on the hate speech, The Greens and the Coalition say the bill has been rushed and aren't prepared to support it in its current form. And now members of your own party are repeatedly calling it, sorry, reportedly calling it a 'shit show'. Will you be amending the bill?
PRIME MINISTER: What we've said, I'd ask you to go back and look at your notes if you were working in December and go and have a look at what the Coalition was saying. Every single day they demanded that Parliament be brought back. They stood up at press conferences and said, 'Parliament should be meeting today and we should be passing hate laws today'. That is what they said. They did it in writing, they did it in press conferences day after day after day, and that was reported substantially.
What the Government has done is to draft laws, to have an exposure draft of those laws, which is something that doesn't always happen, have a committee process so people can examine those laws. I have stood up repeatedly when I announced them and said we want this to receive strong support, particularly from the parties of government. The parties of government should be supporting this across the board. And we've said that if you have ideas for changes, please put them forward now. The Coalition is yet to put forward a single proposed change. They haven't bothered to have a shadow cabinet meeting as of yesterday. At the time that Sussan Ley had her press conference, they hadn't even had an internal process, because they have had people going out there and saying they would oppose these laws before they had even read them. Now, I think that these laws and outlawing hate speech is important. I agree with many of the statements that have been made. We worked with the community, including the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, but we consulted other faith groups as well prior to the legislation being released on Monday, when the Opposition received a full briefing. Two weeks before that or the week before that, on January 5, I met with the Leader of the Opposition. She said then that they had prepared draft legislation. I expressed some surprise at that, given how complex it is, and said if you give that to us, we'll feed that into the process. We're yet to see that. The Opposition seem to think that they can be defined by just what they're against. I want to know what they're for. What changes are they for? Can we work these things through cooperatively? That's what I've been trying to do, not play politics. I haven't been shouting, I haven't been banging lecterns. I haven't been engaged in performative conduct. What I have done is to put forward proposals, after consultation, sitting down with the Leader of the Opposition on a weekly basis, but always available for the Leader of the Opposition or anyone else for that matter, to engage constructively. That is what should occur.
JOURNALIST: Would you accept amendments though to get it through with The Greens? Or is it only [inaudible]?
PRIME MINISTER: What I want to see is the Parliament come together. I've said it consistently. I have said consistently this should be a moment of national unity. After Port Arthur, after the Lindt Cafe siege, after the Bali Bombing, after all of these tragic national events which had an impact on our nation, what we didn't have was a politicisation and that is what I have not engaged in. And I just say to the Opposition, if you have changes that you want to make, tell us what they are. If you have things that you support, tell us what it is you actually support. Because you said you supported bringing back the Parliament and now it's too early. You said you supported hate speech and now you say that it's too hard. Some of your members are saying it goes too far, some are saying it doesn't go far enough. Tell us what you are in favour of and then you can have the basis of a discussion.
JOURNALIST: Jewish leaders are calling for you to not make a deal with a Greens [inaudible]. Will you today rule out a deal with The Greens?
PRIME MINISTER: Well, hang on. Peter Wertheim has said something very different and the Executive Council of Australian Jewry. So, we'll respond respectfully to people across the board. We don't have a majority in the Senate, and we'll engage respectfully with people in the Parliament. In both members of the House of Representatives and the Senate who are engaged. At the moment, there is - this is like trying to grab smoke, trying to get an arrangement with the Coalition. How do you do it? They sat back last year and didn't engage at all on environmental laws. Those environmental laws passed the Parliament. We're engaging constructively. I'd say to the Coalition, if you can let me know now what they're prepared to vote for, I'll respond to any question that people have, because at the moment, I'm not sure what it is, and I don't think they know either.
JOURNALIST: What have you done to defend the eSafety Commissioner from threats of contempt from Congress in the US?
PRIME MINISTER: She's here with me now.
JOURNALIST: Do you think she's well resourced enough to -
PRIME MINISTER: I think she's doing a terrific job. And on coming to office, we reappointed the eSafety Commissioner who was appointed by the former government. We extended the funding and she's now leading what is world leading activity, something of which I think Australia can be proud and I think she can be very proud frankly of the job that she's doing.
JOURNALIST: ESafety is investigating Grok, but what is there to investigate? These images are being generated every day. Why won't you just [inaudible]?
COMMISSIONER INMAN GRANT: So, we have two investigations, one into X for hosting child sexual abuse material. The second that we issued yesterday is around our Designated Internet Standard which prevents high impact AI generative services from creating child sexual abuse and they have affirmative duties to detect, deter, disrupt and prevent the generation of CSAM. This is what we're investigating. Clearly this has been happening. We're taking and removing content that's non-consensual intimate imagery of adults. But I think we all agree that the generation of CSAM is heinous and this needs to be more closely looked at.
JOURNALIST: Would you consider easing pressure on Parliament to pass these laws just within two days given the Opposition has stepped away?
PRIME MINISTER: We don't have a majority in the Senate. The Parliament controls its own destiny going forward. I want legislation to be introduced that is going to be passed. We've engaged constructively. There is an exposure draft out. There is no legislation before the Parliament at this point in time. I want the Parliament to come together, I want the nation to come together. I think that's what the moment demands. That's what I've consistently argued for.
Before we finish, I'll be going now to the State Funeral for Ron Boswell. Can I pay tribute to him. Can I express my condolences to his family. I was able to speak with his daughter to help to organise the State Funeral. Ron Boswell was a very proud Queenslander. He served Queensland in the Senate for a long period of time. He was Leader of the National Party for a long period of time in the Senate as well. He took a very principled stand against One Nation and he's someone who, whilst I would have differences with many of his views, he had the courage of his conviction and he was respected across the Parliament and today will be an opportunity for the nation to give thanks for his service to Queensland and to Australia. Thanks very much.
