New Australian rules force search engines to blur porn and violent images
Search engines face $50m fines under new Australian rules requiring automatic redirects to mental health services for suicide-related searches and blurred pornographic content.
Australians searching for information related to suicide, self-harm and eating disorders online must be automatically redirected to mental health support services under new rules coming into effect this month.
Search engines must also blur image results of online pornography and extreme violence in a bid to protect children, under the first tranche of age-restricted material codes beginning on December 27.
In what is believed to be another world first, the eSafety Commission has told search engines they face fines of up to $50m if they don’t abide by the rules they helped write, and which complement the world-first under-16 social media ban beginning next Wednesday.
Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said that with one in three young people first encountering pornography before they were 13, search engines would now be required to make “safe search” the default.
“This pornography, in our research, is unsolicited, unwelcome and in their face, and the search engine is being used as the gateway to the broader internet,” she said.
“This will prevent the accidental coming across of violent and explicit content that children don’t have the context for that they can’t unsee.”
Adults will still be able to click through to consume the content, or do so from their account if they have age verified, but these changes will prevent children from the incidental exposure.
Ms Inman Grant said another crucial requirement under the code was the automatic redirects to mental health support services for searches related to suicide, self-harm, or eating disorders.
Her team has given the search engines a range of about 40 terms to capture.
“This is about protecting people from taking their lives,” she said.
She said these are “important societal innovations that will provide greater protections for all Australians who don’t wish to see ‘lawful but awful’ content”.
“It gives me some comfort that if there is an Australian child out there thinking about taking their own life, that these vulnerable kids – and adults – instead of being sent down harmful rabbit holes from which they may be no return, will now be directed to professionals who can help and support them,” she said.
“If this change saves even one Australian life, I believe it’s worth the slight inconvenience it might provide to some Australian adults.”
Anticipating criticism that the new rules would be considered an overreach, Ms Inman Grant said she believed most Australians would view the “commonsense” changes as reasonable and proportionate, and perhaps even wonder why they were not already in place.
“But let’s be clear, what this code won’t do is require Australians to have an account to search the internet, or notify the government you are searching for porn,” she added.
“(That is) simply not true.”
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Originally published as New Australian rules force search engines to blur porn and violent images
