Two major changes to how Australians use the internet will come into force next month.

From December 10, anyone under 16 will lose access to accounts on nine major social media platforms. This includes Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and Snapchat. The youth social media ban has been heavily promoted by the federal government and is now widely recognised. Teenagers are already hunting for workarounds, and public pushback has begun. A petition against the ban has tens of thousands of signatures and is spreading through TikTok.

A second change is incoming less than three weeks later. On December 27, search engines such as Google and Microsoft’s Bing will be required to determine a user’s age before deciding what they can show in search results. The new rules are part of a set of industry codes designed by the platforms but enforced by the eSafety Commissioner. The aim is to stop children from seeing pornography, intense violence, self-harm content and suicidal material.

“After the 27th of December, when people are waking up and realising, they need identification, they may start questioning these codes,” RMIT information sciences professor Lisa Given said. “That may make for an interesting January.”

Google holds around 90 per cent of Australia’s search market and Australians collectively conduct tens of billions of searches each year. Users have had to be at least 13 years old to create a Google account. Next month that will not be enough. The new codes require search engines to block extreme content for anyone under 18. If a user is not logged in, searches must be filtered by default with some images blurred to reduce the chance that minors see violent or explicit imagery.

The UK created similar laws earlier this year, which led to VPN downloads spiking by as much as 1800 per cent. Australia is taking a different approach. Rather than apply mandatory age gates at porn sites, the focus is on search engines.

This raises definitional problems.

“Instead of targeting those sites, this really goes across a much broader swath, at the search engine level,” Professor Given said.

“But how are we defining things like self-harm and violence? If we look back at the history of internet filters, they work on term recognition. Searching breastfeeding might trigger the filter because of the word breast. Do we have agreed definitions of self-harm? At the moment, it feels a bit like you know it when you see it.”

The code for search engines is one of three that start on December 27. The other two apply to internet carriage services and hosting services. These codes have been developed since July 2024, well in advance of the social media legislation. They follow earlier codes that targeted illegal content such as child abuse material and pro-terrorism material.

The code was written by the Digital Industry Group, which represents Meta, Microsoft, Apple and Google, along with four other peak industry bodies.

“We believe these codes represent a significant and tangible uplift in Australian online safety regulation for all Australians, including young people,” DIGI regulatory affairs lead Jennifer Duxbury told a government committee in September.

Consumer advocates and human rights organisations are worried about the age assurance requirement for people with accounts. Options mentioned in the codes include facial age estimation, credit card verification, identity document checks, digital IDs or reliance on a verified third party.

“An incremental measure of safety must not be purchased at the cost of the fundamental privacy, anonymity and freedom of expression for an entire generation,” Electronic Frontiers Australia chair John Pane told a recent inquiry.

“The proposed approach trades one type of risk, which is unsuitable content, for another much larger systemic risk, which is the potential mass collection of identity data belonging to children and adults. This would enrich the data holdings and financial position of big tech companies and raise cyber risk on a very significant scale.”