Meta says teen accounts will apply to new users under 16 and restrictions will eventually be extended to existing accounts used by teenagers Meta is putting Instagram users under the age of 18 into new “teen accounts” to allow parents greater control over their activities, including the ability to block children from viewing the app at night. In an announcement made a week after the Australian government proposed restricting children from accessing such platforms, Meta says it is launching teen accounts for Instagram that will apply to new users. The setting will then be extended to existing accounts held by teenagers over time. Continue reading...

Labor ministers hit back at US billionaire, saying he is inconsistent on free speech and calling his comment ‘crackpot stuff’ * Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates * Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast Elon Musk has called the Australian government “fascists” over new legislation aimed at tackling deliberate lies spread on social media. Social media companies could be fined up to 5% of their annual turnover under the commonwealth’s proposed laws. Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email Continue reading...

Meta’s director of privacy policy declines to say whether such an option would be offered to Australians in the future * Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates * Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast Meta is using the public Facebook and Instagram photos and posts of its users to train artificial intelligence and, while European users have been allowed to opt out of the mass-scraping of their content, Australian users do not have that option, a parliamentary committee has heard. The parent company of Facebook and Instagram paused the launch of its AI product in Europe in July due to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) privacy rules, and as a result of GDPR law. Meta was ordered to stop training its large language model on data from European users on privacy concerns, and Meta has given European users an opt-out option. Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email Continue reading...

Home affairs minister Clare O’Neil says systems should soon be back online but business groups say companies may need days to recover * Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates * Get our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcast The home affairs minister, Clare O’Neil, says the company at the centre of the world’s largest ever IT outage has told the federal government it is close to an automatic fix which would allow systems to return online. The global outage on Friday afternoon occurred after the cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike updated a widely used cloud-based software product called Falcon. Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup Continue reading...

Parliamentary inquiry told police forced to ‘cobble together’ laws to prosecute man who allegedly spread deepfake images of women * Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates * Get our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcast A one-stop portal for victims to report AI deepfakes to police should be established, the federal police union has said, lamenting that police were forced to “cobble together” laws to charge the first person to face prosecution for spreading deepfake images of womenlast year. The attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, introduced legislation in parliament in June that will create a new criminal offence of sharing, without consent, sexually explicit images that have been digitally created using artificial intelligence or other forms of technology. Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup Continue reading...

The Australian Electoral Commission says Australia won't be 'immune' to AI-generated misinformation at its next election. 'I can't give you a prediction about whether it will be used,' the AEC commissioner, Tom Rogers, said. 'But we're seeing increased use in these types of tactics in elections around the world. I don't think we're going to be immune to that.' He also told the Senate he doesn't expect there to be the widespread legislation needed before the next election ► Subscribe to Guardian Australia on YouTube Continue reading...