The Weekly Cybers #74
It’s YouTube versus the eSafety Commissioner in the social media age restrictions debate, the ACCC completes its mammoth inquiry into digital platforms, and NSW police reckon they’ve caught the Western Sydney University hacker.
The Weekly Cybers #74 | 27 June 2025
Welcome
Well here we are then. Yes, last week I said I wouldn’t be here this week, because I’m on a semi-holiday. But so much has happened in the digital policy realm that I thought I’d better write something about it. So here are the highlights in brief.
The big one is the social media age restriction policy, and a war of words between the eSafety Commissioner and YouTube over whether the latter should be counted as an age-restricted social media platform.
There’s also been a little more fallout from the age assurance tech trial’s overly-optimistic preliminary findings.
The ACCC completes its landmark inquiry into digital platforms and competition. And NSW police reckon they’ve caught the hacker who’s plagued Western Sydney University.
Should YouTube be included in Australia’s social media age restriction policy?
We had quite a bit on the social media age detection tech trials last week. Since then, while there’s certainly been further action on that front, the discourse has been dominated by questions relating to YouTube.
“Opponents of the policy point to social media’s central role in many aspects of modern life, and suggest that isolating kids from it until they turn 16 will leave them unprepared for the many perils found online”, reports The Register.
“Others wonder why the scheme doesn’t apply to YouTube.”
eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant supported that viewpoint in her speech to the National Press Club on Tuesday. Indeed, she’s called for YouTube to be included in the policy.
Her office’s research has found that around 7 in 10 kids said they’d encountered “content associated with harm”. This includes “misogynistic or hateful material, dangerous online challenges, violent fight videos, and content promoting disordered eating”.
“Children told us that 75% of this content was most recently encountered on social media. YouTube was the most frequently cited platform, with almost 4 in 10 children reporting exposure to content associated with harm there,” Inman Grant said.
At the same time, YouTube has reportedly rolled back its content moderation processes, even when the content violates the company’s own policies.
Inman Grant quite rightly points out that any restriction on kids creating YouTube accounts would be pointless because they could still view all the content without logging in.
YouTube and the commissioner are now exchanging words publicly, shall we say, with YouTube saying they are not a social media platform.
“YouTube is not a social media platform; it is a video streaming platform with a library of free, high-quality content. eSafety’s advice to include YouTube in the social media ban is in direct contradiction to the government’s own commitment, its own research on community sentiment, independent research, and the view of Australian parents, teachers and other key stakeholders in this debate,” said Rachel Lord, YouTube’s ANZ public policy and government relations senior manager.
As we reported back in November 2024, when the legislation was passed, the Online Safety Act defines an age-restricted social media platform differently from a social media service, and there’s ministerial discretion to include or exclude platforms. Effectively, an age-restricted social media platform is whatever the minister thinks it is, based on feels.
Expert resigns from tech trial advisory board
Tim Levy, managing director of children’s safety technology company Qoria, has resigned from the age assurance technology trial’s stakeholder advisory board, citing concerns about transparency and some of the trial’s initial findings.
As we reported last week, the trial’s preliminary findings said: “Age assurance can be done in Australia and can be private, robust and effective”.
The Conversation pointed out the obvious: “The trial’s preliminary findings paint a rosy picture of the potential for available technologies to check people’s ages. However, they contain very little detail about specific technologies, and appear to be at odds with what we know about age-assurance technology from other sources.”
And as Cam Wilson wrote at Crikey, the tech trial is supposed to provide answers, not political cover.
The trial’s full report is expected to be delivered to the communications minister in the latter half of July.
Regulatory reform needed on digital platform marketplace: ACCC
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has released its tenth and final report from its five-year digital platform services inquiry, along with a call for regulatory reform.
“Digital platform services are critically important to Australian consumers and businesses and are major drivers of productivity growth in our economy,” said ACCC Chair Gina Cass-Gottlieb.
“While these services have brought many benefits, they have also created harms that our current competition and consumer laws cannot adequately address. This is why we continue to recommend that targeted regulation of digital platform services is needed to increase competition and innovation, and protect consumers in digital markets.”
The report calls for an economy-wide prohibition on unfair trading practices, an external dispute resolution body for digital platform services, and a new digital competition regime.
The ACCC has separately announced that it will be focusing on the sale of unsafe products in online marketplaces, including product safety issues for young children, and lithium-ion battery safety.
Also in the news
- “The Telegram-based white nationalist network known as Terrorgram has been designated a terrorist organisation by the Australian federal government,” reports Cyber Daily.
- The Australian Computer Society (ACS) says that building a sovereign AI infrastructure would need an investment of $2 billion to $4 billion.
- NSW police have arrested and charged an alleged hacker who they say is responsible for a major series of attacks on Western Sydney University’s systems going back to 2021. Cyber Daily reports police claims that the former university staff member had originally been after discount parking rates before escalating to changing academic results and targeting the wider university.
- More consumers now get their news from social media platforms than from legacy news outlets, according to the latest Digital News Report from the University of Canberra’s News and Media Research Centre. However television remains the most popular first-choice source of news, listed by 37% of respondents. More than one in 20 (6%) said they had asked AI chatbots for news in the last week.
- The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has warned social media influencers to stop promoting illegal gambling services to Australians, with penalties for individuals up to $59,400. “Influencers who facilitate access to illegal online gambling services — such as by giving hyperlinks — can incur even greater penalties, for individuals this could be up to $2,475,000,” ACMA writes.
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Elsewhere
- Pope Leo XIV has issued a warning against generative AI, saying it must help and not hinder children and young people’s development.
- Big tech had a couple of big copyright wins this week. A US judge ruled that Anthropic’s use of books to train its AI systems did not breach copyright law, although copying and storing more than 7 million pirated books in a central library did infringe the authors’ copyrights. Meta won a similar case. The authors had not presented enough evidence that AI would cause “market dilution” by flooding the market with work similar to theirs.
- From The Conversation, “Is AI a con? A new book punctures the hype and proposes some ways to resist“. It’s book in question is, The AI Con.
Inquiries of note
Nothing new yet.
What’s next?
Parliament is scheduled to return on Tuesday 22 July, which is three and a half weeks away.
DOES SOMETHING IN THE EMAIL LOOK WRONG? If there’s ever a factual error, editing mistake, or confusing typo, it’ll be corrected in the web archives.
The Weekly Cybers is a personal look at what the Australian government has been saying and doing in the digital and cyber realms, on various adjacent topics, and whatever else interests me, Stilgherrian, published every Friday afternoon (nearly).
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