Child Safety Officer 

Social Media Reforms designed to Protect our Children online:  

When looking at allowing your child access to social media accounts, it is important to consider the maturity and resilience of the individual child. As parents and guardians, it is also good to think about how we can support them being accountable for their account usage.

Setting accounts to ‘private’ and not ‘public’ and using social media respectfully, following the guidelines set by the sites, and discussing the values you want your child to uphold while communicating online is important.

Most of the popular social media services require users to be at least 13 years of age before they can register, but this is changing at the end of 2025.

You may have heard about the recent changes to age restrictions for Social Media Platforms. The ‘Online Safety Amendment’ requires ‘age-restricted social media platforms’ to take reasonable steps to prevent Australians under 16 years from having accounts.

New legislation has passed through Parliament, which sets a minimum age limit for social media platforms including Snapchat, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and X.

Social media platforms operating in Australia have 12 months to develop and roll out systems to enforce the age restrictions, which are expected to be in place by the end of 2025.

The e-Safety Commissioner will work with industry to make sure there is compliance with the laws, with strict privacy protections to be implemented to protect Australians through the process of age assurance.

The e-Safety Commissioner https://www.esafety.gov.au/  is the best resource for information, tips, courses, for all online, issues or questions for parents, students and educators. 

Bettina Townsend

Child Safety Officer