AUSTRALIAN EYES ON AMERICA
I’ve been trying to understand Australia’s proposed digital duty of care, and I keep coming back to one fairly simple thought: I want my girls to be safe online.
The less simple question is what we should do to make that happen.
I’m an Australian dad living in the United States. I’ve watched this discussion develop in both countries, and I can see why people come at it from different directions. But I’m not writing this because I’ve landed on a firm position. I haven’t. I’m trying to work out what the proposal would actually mean for families like mine, and what questions I’d want answered before deciding whether it’s a good idea.
What does “duty of care” mean online?
“Digital duty of care” sounds like something I’d have to sign before being allowed into a meeting.
As I understand it, Australia wants online platforms to take more responsibility for the harm their services can cause. That means looking at how the platforms work, including the algorithms that decide what keeps turning up in our feeds, rather than waiting for someone to report a problem after it’s happened. The proposal would also give people more choice about those feeds.
I can see why that appeals to parents. I’d like to know the people running these platforms have thought about what happens when a child uses them. But I’m still trying to understand what they would actually be required to do. If my daughter is being bullied, I want the platform to act. Beyond cases like that, who decides what counts as harm, and what would acting on it look like?
For now, this is still a proposal. The Australian Government’s exposure draft and consultation material describe a new responsibility for online services to manage risks and prevent serious harms. The government says the framework is meant to improve safety while protecting freedom of expression. Those aims sound compatible in a sentence. The difficult work is deciding how they fit together when a real case lands in front of a platform.
The part I understand as a dad
It’s hard to monitor what your children see online every minute of every day. My girls are still young, and I can already imagine how much harder that will become as they get older and want more privacy and independence.
If stronger safeguards help protect my girls from bullying and harmful material, I’m all for them. Kids shouldn’t have to manage every online risk alone just because the internet is difficult to regulate.
I worry about AI-generated and manipulated images, too. Someone could take an ordinary photo of one of my girls and alter it to make it look as if she’d done something she never did. I would hate for that to happen. Once someone shares a manipulated image, getting it back under control can be nearly impossible.
In a case like that, I’d want the image removed, the person responsible to face consequences, and the platform to face financial penalties if it failed to respond properly. That feels clear to me. Where I get stuck is deciding what rules should apply to material that upsets or harms people but isn’t obviously illegal. Who decides what crosses the line? How do we give platforms enough responsibility to act without asking them to remove anything that might attract criticism? Those questions are not an argument against protecting children. They’re part of working out what protection should look like.
Why the debate sounds different across the Pacific
Living in America has made me more aware of how quickly questions about government power and free speech enter the conversation here. The US administration’s response to Australia’s proposal focused on the risk of censorship and the effects the rules could have on American technology companies. Australia’s proposal, by contrast, starts with the responsibility of online services to take reasonable steps against foreseeable harms.
That’s a difference in emphasis, rather than a neat split where one country cares about safety and the other doesn’t. People in both places worry about children and value free expression. But in my experience, Australians are often more comfortable asking what rules might help, while Americans are quicker to ask who gets to make those rules and how far they could reach. I understand both questions. I don’t want a platform shrugging off serious harm. But I also don’t want a broad or unclear standard to become a reason for lawful speech to disappear. I’m not sure there’s a simple line that resolves that tension for every situation.
Age checks bring privacy into it
The question gets more personal when the proposed solution involves proving who you are, or how old you are.
Here in Tennessee, state law requires age verification for certain websites with material considered harmful to minors. I understand the aim: children shouldn’t be accessing adult material. But I still find myself asking what information a user has to provide, who handles it, and what happens to it afterwards. People have challenged the Tennessee law in court, too. The argument over where to draw the line is far from settled.
When I walk into a shop to buy alcohol, someone checks my ID and lets me go. As far as I know, they don’t record my details or keep a list of what I’ve bought. What is the online equivalent? Can a service confirm that I’m an adult without storing my identity or keeping a record of what I visit?
That distinction matters to me. I could be comfortable with age verification if it genuinely confirmed age without retaining identity or browsing history. I’m less comfortable with the idea of handing over personal information without understanding who can see it or how long it stays around.
I already get spam calls and adverts that seem to know an unsettling amount about my interests. I don’t know where every detail comes from, and I’m not claiming my phone reads my mind. But the experience does leave me wondering how much information is collected as we move through everyday life online. And then there’s the question I keep coming back to: twenty years ago, most of us weren’t asked to prove our age before using the internet. The online world has changed, and children can now encounter things that were much harder to reach. That’s a real difference. Still, I want to understand why a particular check is needed, whether it will work, and what information it will create before I decide I’m comfortable with it.
I’m still working it out
I don’t want the government telling me how to raise my children or what they should believe. I do think government has a role when children are neglected or seriously harmed. Between those two statements sits a lot of difficult territory, especially when a platform’s design can influence what a child sees without a parent knowing it’s happening.
I want my girls protected from bullying, exploitation and manipulated images. Platforms to take responsibility when their systems contribute to serious harm. I also want parents to remain parents, and I want people to have privacy online.
I can’t yet say exactly how all of that should be balanced. So I’m trying to understand the proposal before deciding what I think of it: what risks it is meant to address, what platforms would have to do, who decides when they’ve done enough, and what information users may be asked to give up along the way.
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