Australia’s government spent the week boxing Big Tech

Australia rolled out a broad set of tech policy initiatives in one week: proposing a social media minimum age, pressing Meta over using public posts (including images of minors) to train AI, threatening action after Meta withdrew from the News Media Bargaining Code, updating privacy and hate-speech laws (including criminalizing doxxing), introducing a framework to compel platforms to address misinformation/disinformation, and unveiling an anti-scam plan with penalties up to AUD$50 million; several measures are expected to progress in the coming months.