The Albanese Government have announced that YouTube will be included in its under-16 social media laws which currently applied to Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and X.
The inclusion of YouTube is the result of sustained campaigning by the organisation 36 Months, established by Nova 969 breakfast host Michael ‘Wippa’ Wipfli and CEO of production company FINCH, Rob Galluzzo, to raise the age from 13 to 16 for young Australians to have a social media accounts.
Wippa and Rob were both in Canberra (pictured – Wippa far left, Rob far right) when the Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Minister for Communications Anika Wells made the announcement.
The Prime Minister said:
“Our Government is making it clear – we stand on the side of families.
Social media has a social responsibility and there is no doubt that Australian kids are being negatively impacted by online platforms so I’m calling time on it.
Social media is doing social harm to our children, and I want Australian parents to know that we have their backs.”
The new rules, which come into action on December 10, 2025, will see fines for social media platforms of up to $49.5 million for failing to take responsible steps to prevent underage account holders onto their services. The move has also been divisive with parents and teens with Wippa and the Minister for Communications engaging in a question and answer session yesterday, which you can listen to and read below.
Youtube’s parent company Google has today advised publishers and advertisers that it will begin using machine learning to estimate the age of signed-in users. The innovation will first be tested and rolled out in the United States, but today’s government decision is likely to mean that Australia will also be a high priority market for the changes. An email to Australian publishers today said:
Over the next few weeks, we’ll begin to roll out this update to a small set of users in the US to help us further protect young people as they use Google products. We’ll closely monitor this before we roll it out more widely.
For our publisher ad products, when our machine learning model flags a Google signed-in user as likely under 18, they will be provided additional ad safeguards. This includes:
• Disabling ads personalisation
• Disallowing sensitive creative categories from serving
These changes will be applied to demand served through Google publisher products (Ad Manager, AdSense and AdMob) when Google Account information is used. There is no action needed at this time.
Disabiling timelines and reminders to get off screen time will also be part of the Google changes aimed to introduce “age appropriate protections.”