Meta introduces TV-Style safeguards on Instagram

We can’t be sure what will happen when Australia’s social media age restrictions finally come into effect, but they have already begun to change the online media landscape.

Australia is the first country in the world to ban children from using social media, with under-16s told to log off for good, but will the new laws work as intended?

Prime Minster Anthony Albanese’s recent speech to the UK Labour Party Conference in Liverpool put trust front and centre. He argued that centre-left governments build lasting social change by delivering on their commitments and staying in office long enough to do so. “Delivering change is more difficult than demanding it,” he said. “Working within the system is tougher than railing against it.”

Disclosure, consent and platform power have become newly invigorated battlefields with the rise of AI. The issue came to the fore recently with YouTube’s controversial decision to use AI-powered tools to “unblur, denoise and improve clarity” for some of the content uploaded to the platform. This was done without the consent, or even knowledge, of the relevant content creators. Viewers of the material knew nothing of YouTube’s intervention.