Australian children could be barred from some websites, as a furore between Australian politicians and billionaire Elon Musk reignites calls for age verification technology.
Whether graphic content should remain on social media has become the subject of heated debate as social media site X, formerly Twitter, fights an edict from the eSafety Commissioner to remove content of a stabbing at a Sydney church.
This comes as the social media giant’s owner Elon Musk and Australia’s politicians engage in a war of words, calling independent senator Jacqui Lambie an “enemy of the people” after she called him a “social media knob,” and trading jabs with the prime minister who labelled him an “arrogant billionaire.”
Opposition communications spokesman David Coleman has joined the fray, pointing to the detrimental impacts of social media on children’s mental health and calling for a trial of age verification technology.
“It’s unacceptable” he told ABC radio on Tuesday.
“We would never have agreed consciously to the situation that we find ourselves in, with young children accessing this sort of distressing material basically every day.
“That’s why taking action is so important.”
The online safety watchdog in March 2023 outlined a road map for age verification and though it was aimed at mitigating the harms children experience from online pornography rather than violent content, its mechanisms could apply broadly.
The eSafety report recommends first trialling a range of options as age assurance technologies often have trade-offs.
For example, ID-based solutions can exclude those without documents and facial estimation can be inaccurate.
As X battles the watchdog’s takedown notice in Federal Court, it has temporarily geoblocked graphic content of the April 15 incident.
The eSafety Commissioner has argued that geoblocking, rather than a blanket take-down, did not go far enough to comply with its direction.
A spokesperson from the eSafety commissioner clarified that the removal notice did not relate to commentary, public debate or other posts about the event, “even those which may link to extreme violent content,” only videos of the specific stabbing event.
However, Mr. Musk has argued the order to take down posts globally was illegal as the Australian agency could not dictate what overseas users could see and the takedown went against free speech principles.
Communications Minister Michelle Rowland would not comment on jurisdiction while the case was before the court but said the commissioner had “exercised their powers in accordance with a law passed by our parliament.”
When questioned on consistency, Ms. Rowland said the takedown order targeting the stabbing video was different from other graphic content circulating due to the April 15 attack being declared a terrorist act.
Class one material includes content that depicts real violence that has a high degree of impact in a gratuitous manner and was likely to cause offence.
“In this case, the very high degree of impact is reached by virtue of the terrorism designation that has been given to this particular event,” Ms. Rowland said.
At least one video of a boy repeatedly stabbing Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel during a sermon at Christ the Good Shepherd Church was still easily accessible on Facebook on Wednesday.
Ms. Rowland encouraged people to report such videos rather than forward them.
“We don’t want vulnerable people to be seeing content that may, for example, lead to their radicalisation, we don’t want child sexual abuse or child sexual exploitation material proliferating on the internet.”
