Saturday Magazine

17 Aug 2025

Saturday 16th, August, 2025: Cam Wilson, Assoc. Editor Crikey, Teen Social Media Ban and Internet Conspiracy Theories

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Saturday 16th, August, 2025: Cam Wilson, Assoc. Editor Crikey, Teen Social Media Ban and Internet Conspiracy Theories

Nevena and Kenny are joined live on air by, Cam Wilson, Crikey’s associate editor. He previously worked as a reporter at the ABC, BuzzFeed, Business Insider and Gizmodo. He primarily covers internet culture and tech in Australia.

“Australia’s social media minimum age policy has always been about protecting teens from online harms. In the year since the law was passed, the federal government’s diagnosis for the cause of this harm has changed.

In the eight months since the teen social media ban law passed, the federal government has seemed unchanged in its commitment to the policy. But during that time, there’s been a subtle shift in its argument for restricting children under 16 from having social media accounts. And this change — largely unnoticed — is crucial to understanding whether the ban will be a success or a failure on the government’s own terms.

When Prime Minister Anthony Albanese spoke about the law in late 2024, he repeated the line “social media is doing social harm to our young Australians”.

https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/08/12/teen-social-media-ban-rationale/

New Shooters, Fishers and Farmers MP distances himself from ‘conspiracy theories on Port Arthur’

“Carlo Di Falco’s electorate includes Port Arthur. He says the mass shooting was politicised but that he does not agree with ‘conspiracy theories’ from a former party executive.

Di Falco has been outspoken in his criticism of the gun law reforms that followed Australia’s worst-ever mass shooting, the Port Arthur massacre where Bryant killed 35 people in the seat of Lyons.

“The mechanism that was responsible for this shift was willingness of the media to over-report and hyper-sensationalise rare tragic events,” Di Falco said in a 2023 SFF submission to a government inquiry.

This sentiment has been echoed by other SFF party members who have raised questions about whether Bryant was responsible for the shooting, including former secretary of the party’s Tasmania branch Phillip Bigg.

Bryant confessed to carrying out the mass murder and there were dozens of eyewitnesses who identified him as the shooter, including some who spoke to the media at the time. Despite this, there are still active communities of Port Arthur “truthers”, and as many as 1 in 10 Australians believe that the attack was “orchestrated with the intent of restricting gun laws”.

https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/08/07/shooters-fishers-farmers-mp-distances-port-arthur-massacre-conspiracy-theories/