Musk’s war with Australia: Coalition pushes compulsory age limits for social media

The Coalition says young children should be blocked from social media to protect them from violent content, and age verification made compulsory, as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese feuds with billionaire Elon Musk over his refusal to take down footage of the Sydney church stabbing.

ASIO boss Mike Burgess and federal police chief Reece Kershaw will on Wednesday vow to protect “children and other vulnerable people” from “being bewitched online by a cauldron of extremist poison”, with both calling on platforms such as X and Facebook to do better.

As Musk attracted worldwide attention with his fight against the Australian take-down order, the Coalition revealed it was in favour of barring young children from digital platforms.

“We urgently need to back the eSafety Commissioner and get moving on age verification for children on social media,” opposition communications spokesman David Coleman said in an interview.

“We don’t go ‘hey, let’s show a 10-year-old an X-rated movie’ and nobody is suggesting we should. And yet we’re somehow supposed to accept that happens on social media and it’s OK.”

Coleman said some US states had picked 15 or 16 as the age at which children should be allowed on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, whose creation earlier this century coincided with steep rises in youth mental health disorders. Some platforms disallow users under 13 but do not ask for proof of age.

Elon Musk is the founder of Tesla and owner of social platform X, formerly Twitter.Credit: AP

Escalating the debate on tech dangers, Burgess and Kershaw will use a National Press Club speech to call out social media firms fuelling “social combustion” and acting with indifference to discord sowed by bad faith actors.

“Some of our children and other vulnerable people are being bewitched online by a cauldron of extremist poison on the open and dark web. That’s one serious problem,” Kershaw will say, according to draft speech notes.

“If we consider the disinformation and misinformation from two shocking incidents in Sydney this month, and how that social combustion was propagated throughout the world, we see the consequences of that indifference and defiance.”

Burgess sounded the alarm on artificial intelligence making radicalisation of extremists “easier and faster” just weeks after he confirmed the 16-year-old who stabbed a Sydney priest was allegedly motivated by religious ideology.

“This is not hypothetical. ASIO is investigating a number of Australians who belong to a nationalist and racist extremist network. They use an encrypted chat platform to communicate with offshore extremists, sharing vile propaganda, posting tips about homemade weapons and discussing how to provoke a race war.”

Late on Monday, eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant sprung a legal injunction on X with minimal notice and succeeded in winning an interim Federal Court order to hide dozens of links showing an alleged 16-year-old terrorist strike Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel during a live-streamed service.

X lawyers claimed the platform had already geo-blocked the video so users in Australia could not see it unless they were using a VPN service allowing them to see overseas content. But the Australian watchdog pushed back by arguing the videos should not be allowed to remain online and possibly be used to radicalise.

Musk spent days arguing that Inman Grant’s take-down request amounted to a single nation attempting to dictate the content viewed by people overseas, comparing her to a communist regime censor.

“Should the eSafety Commissar (an unelected official) in Australia have authority over all countries on Earth?” Musk posted.

The regulator said it expected another court hearing later this week at which a temporary order demanding X to hide the videos would be debated and potentially extended. The commissioner will also push for fines of up to $782,000 for each day X had not complied.

“This is an egotist,” Albanese said of Musk on Tuesday.

“He is someone who’s totally out of touch with the values that Australian families have, and this is causing great distress.”

“I think it is causing damage to his own brand of Twitter, which has now become X. He clearly sees this as a vanity project for himself.”

At the same time as senior Coalition MPs such as Opposition Leader Peter Dutton condemned Musk, right-wing and libertarian critics joined Musk in condemning Inman Grant on free speech grounds.

LNP Senator Matt Canavan said Albanese had “caused more division by shamelessly tying a violent video to his agenda to outlaw some types of speech”, while independent senator Ralph Babet posted a video of the church stabbing and said “go f--- yourself” to Inman Grant.

Daniel Wild, a senior advocate from the Institute of Public Affairs think tank, called Inman Grant an activist whose powers had been expanded from merely protecting children online.

“She will continue to expand her role to police the internet to censor debate in a way that’s consistent with her own ideological views,” Wild said.

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