Whose Safety? Digital Bans in a Settler Colony

The legislation requires social media platforms operating in so-called Australia, such as Snapchat, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and X, to develop and roll out systems to enforce the legislation’s age restrictions by the end of this year. Despite being framed as a universal child protection measure, the legislation’s swift passage last November and blanket ban has raised serious concerns among experts, community organisations and even the Australian Human Rights Commission. While the legislation is driven by legitimate concerns about online safety, cyberbullying, and digital harms, important to these discussions is the necessary scrutiny of its differential impacts on First Nations youth and children.

According to a 2018 research report by Bronwyn Carlson and Ryan Frazer, 88% of survey respondents reported seeing examples of racism towards First Nations peoples on social media. Indeed, the ways in which social media and the internet have facilitated “the extension of racist discourse” and “the coordination of white supremacist and anti-Indigenous hate groups” is well documented, further entangling these technologies in “the extension and reproduction of settler geographies”. Nevertheless, as First Nations and other researchers have underscored, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities have also employed these platforms as transformative sites where language revitalisation, knowledge sharing, and community organising occur. For First Nations children and youth in particular, social media platforms have evolved beyond mere social networking to become a critical infrastructure for cultural continuity and collective wellbeing, thereby politically reterritorializing these digital spaces. While the legislation treats social media as a uniform space of risk, First Nations communities have transformed these platforms into sophisticated networks of cultural practice and collective care. The policy’s universalist approach thus fails to recognize the ways in which different communities have developed distinct practices of digital engagement.

Moreover, just as social media has emerged as an essential tool for documenting state violence and oppression from the genocide in Palestine to the #NoDAPL protests to the Black Lives Matter movement, First Nations communities similarly put social media to use to record and resist ongoing colonial violence, making visible what settler institutions often render invisible. Despite inequalities in access to these technologies, social media spaces have emerged as sites of political organising, resistance, and cultural expression, facilitating the creation of “digital assemblages of care”. For instance, the #LearnOurTruth social media campaign led by the National Indigenous Youth Education Coalition is specifically focused on centring the voices and experiences of young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The campaign calls attention to the urgent need for the true history of First Nations peoples to be learnt in schools including the impact of settler colonial violences on the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Moreover, against the backdrop of mainstream media’s failure to report sensitively and adequately on First Nations issues, social media provides vital alternative platforms for First Nations voices, perspectives, and vibrant expression. For instance, organisations such as IndigenousX have played an essential role in platforming First Nations voices and prioritizing grassroots approaches. This is also reflected in the ways in which damage-centred narratives of deficit and technological apathy in the context of Indigenous users’ engagement with social media have been repudiated by First Nations researchers to centre “the many liberatory, Indigenising and anti-colonial possibilities social media makes possible”. A universal blanket ban risks severing these vital community and cultural connections for First Nations youth and children.

In a media release published on the day the Act passed legislation, Minister for Communications, Michelle Rowland was quoted saying “The Albanese Government is resolute in its commitment to keeping children safe online, and the passage of this vital legislation is just one way we’re delivering on this commitment”.  A striking contradiction emerges in examining the state’s “commitment to keeping children safe online” even as the Northern Territory’s Country Liberal Party government passed legislation to lower the age of criminal responsibility from 12 to 10, just weeks prior to the passing of the social media ban. While purporting to protect all children equally online, the state simultaneously pursues policies that disproportionately expose First Nations children to institutional harms through increased contact with violent carceral systems. This paradox reveals how settler colonial protection policies often mask continuing structures of colonial control. The state’s emphasis on keeping all children safe from online harms while simultaneously increasing their exposure to carceral violence—an issue widely recognised as disproportionately impacting First Nations children and youth—raises serious questions about what forms of ‘safety’ are being prioritised and for whom.

Any path toward genuine protection of children must simultaneously confront the systemic violences embedded in colonial institutions while affirming the autonomy and agency of First Nations communities in both digital and physical spaces. This demands a fundamental shift away from restrictive top-down policies towards approaches that embrace and affirm First Nations sovereignty and self-determination. To be sure, true safety emerges not from paternalistic protection but a more fundamental dismantling of structures that seek to harm First Nations youth while also supporting their right to thrive in culturally and politically sustaining spaces, both online and offline.

The focus on restricting youth social media access highlighted by the implementation of the act obscures a more fundamental issue. While the Online Safety Amendment Act 2024 aims to protect young people from online harms, it fails to address how social media platforms themselves harvest, monetise, and control user data, including culturally sensitive information shared by First Nations communities. Specifically, the use of exploitative data practices by social media platforms raises crucial questions about data sovereignty. Indigenous Data Sovereignty is an Indigenous led movement that emphasises the right of First Nations peoples to govern the collection, ownership, and application of their own data. While social media platforms offer vital opportunities for cultural connection and political organising for First Peoples, they simultaneously also extract and commodify Indigenous cultural knowledge and personal information. As such, the legislation’s narrow emphasis on access restrictions represents a missed opportunity to advance meaningful data sovereignty protections.

Undoubtedly, social media corporations have consistently prioritised engagement metrics and profit over user safety, warranting necessary regulation by governments globally. However, in instances where organisations have been pushed to invest in safety mechanisms such as content moderation, this has often come at a cost to marginalised communities. For instance, research demonstrates the inadequacy of automated content moderation systems that fail to understand the cultural context of information shared within marginalised communities leading to the inappropriate removal of sensitive content while allowing harmful racist content to proliferate. Perhaps, a more effective approach to online safety and data protection needs to hold platforms more stringently accountable for implementing safety mechanisms and ethical data practices rather than simply removing children and young people from such spaces entirely. Not to mention the distinctly terra nullius connotations that such a move evokes for First Nations communities!

In the context of a settler colony where so-called Australia’s colonial past is continually presented as “something to celebrate rather than confront”, social media has proven indispensable not only for increasing public awareness of colonial violence and rallying support but also crucially as the “galaxy where Indigenous strength and talent is recognised”. As Prof. Bronwyn Carlson highlights, more research led by First Nations researchers into the impact of social media on the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders needs to be funded. Ultimately, the challenge lies not in restricting youth access, but in developing comprehensive frameworks that advance platform accountability while addressing vital issues of Indigenous data sovereignty.

Author position statement:

I have written this work as a settler and first-generation immigrant and an uninvited resident on Gadigal Country and humbly recognise my perspectives as inescapably partial, provisional, and contingent. As a racialised scholar, I remain committed to divesting from all forms of settler futurity and recognise the importance of paying attention to the ways in which power operates to oppress, contain, and to dismiss.