Digital Duty of Care: Preparing for a New Era of Online Safety in Australia
What has happened?
On 8 September 2026, the Australian Government released an exposure draft of the Online Safety Amendment (Digital Duty of Care) Bill 2026 (Bill).
The release of this Bill is a significant development for online safety and introduces the highly anticipated online digital duty of care in Australia. The Bill has the potential to fundamentally reshape online safety by capturing a wide range of online services.
The Australian Government is seeking feedback on the Bill and stakeholders have until 12pm on 22 September 2026 to provide a concise submission to the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications, Sport and the Arts.
For more information about the Bill, please visit the Department’s website.
Key takeaways
The Bill’s centrepiece is the introduction of the digital duty of care to the Online Safety Act 2021 (Cth) (Online Safety Act). The digital duty of care will:
impose a duty on persons responsible for online services to ensure a safe online environment;
protect Australian children online;
provide complaints schemes and mechanisms to investigate, remove and remediate illegal or seriously harmful material; and
provide for an eSafety Commissioner to promote, monitor, investigate and enforce compliance with the Act.
What is changing?
What is the digital duty of care
The Bill will introduce a new digital duty of care to the Online Safety Act requiring a person responsible for an online service to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, a safe online environment (section 26).
An online service is broadly defined and effectively captures any business that provides, distributes, hosts, facilitates, searches, carries or supports online services used by Australians. The definition is intended to cover social media platforms, messaging services, search engines, app stores, cloud and hosting providers, internet service providers, technology suppliers that support these services and services that allow users to generate material using artificial intelligence.
Given online service is broadly defined, the digital duty of care will extend across the entire digital services ecosystem in Australia.
The digital duty of care places a positive obligation on an online service to provide a safe online environment. A safe online environment is an online environment that protects:
all users from seriously harmful material and content; and
children from material that is harmful and the harms associated with the operation of design features of online services (for example, endless content feeds).
Seriously harmful content includes material that promotes self harm, abuse and bullying, sexual violence and extreme violence or cruelty.
In addition, social media services must not enable design features for children under the age of 16 that have negative behavioural impacts.
To comply with the digital duty of care, a person must:
manage design features of the service appropriately, including by providing user empowerment tools as required;
conduct risk assessments; and
take effective measures necessary to address the risk assessments (section 26).
The duty is not absolute and requires online services to take reasonable and proportionate measures to ensure a safe online environment.
The responsible Minister has a range of powers to make legislative instruments to respond to emerging risks, harms and technology, including to:
exempt an online service from the operation of the digital duty of care;
determine an online service is a social media service;
determine material or conduct that the Minister is satisfied may cause serious harm; and
determine that a design feature is taken to have a negative behavioural impact.
eSafety Commissioner powers
The eSafety Commissioner will be responsible for overseeing compliance and enforcement of the digital duty of care. Under section 26E, the Commissioner may publish public guidelines to assist online services to meet their digital duty of care obligations. This guidance will be a valuable resource to assist persons responsible for online services to comply with their digital duty of care obligations.
The eSafety Commissioner will have the power to issue formal warnings, remedial directions and enforce the digital duty of care.
A failure to comply with the digital duty of care attracts a maximum civil penalty of 60,000 penalty units (currently $109.2 million for a body corporate) (section 26B).
Why these changes matter
The Bill introduces significant changes to the Online Safety Act. While the majority of the Bill’s media coverage has focused on social media algorithms, the Bill’s broad reach effectively captures the entire online services ecosystem beyond social media platforms. If the Bill passes as currently drafted, the digital duty of care will set a new online safety benchmark for affected service providers in Australia.
The digital duty of care represents a shift in focus of online safety from harmful content to the design of online services, features and algorithms. The digital duty of care will require service providers to address reasonably foreseeable risks associated with seriously harmful material and platform design features that adversely impact users.
Safety-by-design will become a cornerstone feature of online digital services to create and maintain an online environment designed and operated with online safety in mind.
Preparing for compliance with the digital duty of care
Organisations that provide, support or enable online services should begin evaluating their readiness for the proposed digital duty of care. This includes determining whether they fall within the scope of the Bill and assessing whether their product features, child safety controls, risk management practices, governance structures and user complaint mechanisms are capable of meeting the new digital duty of care obligations. While online services will have 12 months to be digital duty of care ready, early preparation will help organisations adapt to a regulatory framework focused on preventing harm, rather than simply responding to it.