Reset.Tech Australia children and algorithmic harms campaign (2021–ongoing)

The Reset.Tech Australia children and algorithmic harms campaign is the principal Australian civil-society policy-research campaign on the structural regulation of platform profiling, targeted advertising, and algorithmic recommendation of harmful content to children and young people. Anchored by Reset.Tech Australia — the Sydney-based research and policy organisation launched in November 2020 as the Australian arm of the global Reset network — the campaign opened on 26 April 2021 with the report Profiling Children for Advertising: Facebook's Monetisation of Young People's Personal Data, and has run as a sustained five-year arc since: a sequence of investigative reports using fake-account methodology and ad-buying experiments to document the platform mechanisms by which Australian children are profiled and targeted, a thread of named Australian-government submissions translating the empirical findings into the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) review and the Online Safety Act 2021 (Cth) review, and a consultation-stage policy programme aimed at the Children's Online Privacy Code due to be registered by 10 December 2026. The campaign's working argument across the five-year arc has held steady: that the platform business model — surveillance-based targeted advertising plus engagement-optimised recommender, moderation, and ad-approval systems — is the upstream cause of children's algorithmic harm, and that the right object of Australian regulatory intervention is the structural design of these systems rather than age-gating, social-media bans, or user-side measures alone.

Founding: Profiling Children for Advertising (April 2021)

The campaign's seed artefact was the April 2021 report Profiling Children for Advertising: Facebook's Monetisation of Young People's Personal Data, authored by Dylan Williams, Alexandra McIntosh, and Reset Australia's Director of Children's Policy Rys Farthing. The report combined a 400-respondent YouGov survey of 16-17-year-old Australian Facebook users with an ad-buying experiment in which the research team purchased adverts targeted at audiences of approximately one thousand under-18 Australians and documented the price points at which the platform's advertising stack served them: roughly AU$127 to reach a thousand under-18 users tagged on smoking interests, AU$38 to reach the extreme-weight-loss segment, and as little as AU$3 to reach the alcohol-interest segment. The report's headline policy demand was for an Australian data code with a "best interests of the child" principle, modelled on the United Kingdom's Age Appropriate Design Code. InnovationAus, Mumbrella, and a wide swath of Australian and international media carried the report through the news cycle as the campaign's evidentiary case-in-chief that the platform business model itself was the operative cause of children's algorithmic harm.

Three months after the report's publication, on 27 July 2021, Meta announced a global restriction on advertising to under-18 users on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger — advertisers could now only target under-18 users by age, location, and gender, dropping interest-, behaviour-, and inferred-segment-based targeting for that age group. Reset Australia framed the announcement as a reactive corporate response to the Profiling Children report's evidentiary case, with then-Executive Director Chris Cooper noting in the organisation's press release that Meta had been "caught red-handed profiling kids based on their interests in things like alcohol, smoking, extreme weight loss and gambling". The Meta announcement is the campaign's single most-cited corporate-side outcome and the artefact through which the campaign established its working credibility in the Australian platform-policy ecosystem. As an outcome it is qualified: Meta cited unspecified regulators rather than Reset Australia specifically as the prompt, the corporate change did not address inferred-segment ad-targeting routed through Meta pixels embedded on third-party sites, and in November 2021 a joint Reset Australia, Fairplay, and Global Action Plan follow-on investigation showed Facebook continuing to track teenagers via pixels despite the July 2021 policy change.

Campaign architecture: investigative reports, government submissions, coalition advocacy

The campaign's architecture across the 2021-onward arc has run on three tracks operating in parallel, each calibrated to a different audience for the structural-rules argument:

• An investigative-research track producing sequential platform-by-platform reports — Profiling Children for Advertising on Facebook in April 2021, Designing for Disorder on Instagram in April 2022, Surveilling Young People Online on TikTok in 2022, and the Not Just Algorithms multi-platform audit of TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X, and Google's YouTube in March 2024 — each combining survey research, fake-account testing, and ad-buying experimentation to document the platform-side mechanisms that produce children's harm.
• A government-submission track translating the investigative findings into named Australian-government processes: the March 2023 submission to the Privacy Act Review consultation, the January 2024 Implementing the Privacy Act Review to Advance Children's [Best Interests] policy paper, the campaign's 2024 submissions to the Online Safety Act review, the campaign's appearance before the Joint Select Committee on Social Media and Australian Society in July 2024, and the August 2025 Children's Online Privacy Code and Targeted Advertising roundtable paper feeding into the OAIC's Code consultation.
• A coalition-advocacy track in which Reset.Tech Australia partners with international children's-rights organisations (the US-based Fairplay on Designing for Disorder; the UK-based Global Action Plan on the November 2021 pixel-tracking research) and with the Australian Child Rights Taskforce, the peak Australian children's-rights body co-convened by UNICEF Australia and bringing together more than one hundred Australian organisations on the children's online-privacy file.

The three tracks share a single substantive argument: that the platform business model rather than individual content moderation decisions is the operative cause of children's algorithmic harm, that the policy instrument therefore needs to constrain the business model rather than treat children's online safety as a content-moderation file, and that enforceable Australian rules with statutory transparency and independent-research data-access obligations are the correct destination.

Designing for Disorder: the pro-eating-disorder bubble (April 2022)

In April 2022 Reset.Tech Australia and the US-based children's-rights organisation Fairplay published Designing for Disorder: Instagram's Pro-Eating Disorder Bubble, a joint investigation of the recommendation of pro-eating-disorder content to children on Instagram. The report combined a quantitative audit of pro-eating-disorder accounts on Instagram with engagement-flow analysis of the platform's recommender system, and found that approximately 25 per cent of the Australian pro-eating-disorder content bubble on Instagram was held by under-18 accounts, including accounts as young as ten. The report estimated that Meta's annual global revenue from underage accounts in the pro-eating-disorder content bubble was approximately US$62 million. Reset.Tech Australia's own landing page for the report framed the finding as evidence that Meta's recommender system on Instagram was the operative mechanism that scaled the pro-eating-disorder bubble to children, and the report's policy demand was that the algorithmic recommendation of demonstrable-harm content to minors be treated as a product-safety failure rather than a content-moderation question.

Surveilling Young People Online: TikTok (2022)

The campaign's 2022 Surveilling Young People Online: An Investigation into TikTok's Data Processing Practices extended the Profiling Children methodology to TikTok. A 238-respondent survey of 16-17-year-old Australian TikTok users found that 67.8 per cent of respondents did not believe they had given meaningful consent to TikTok's data processing, and the report's working argument was that the consent-based scheme of the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) cannot ground the protection of children's data on platforms whose business model assumes profile-based targeting at scale. The report positioned TikTok alongside Meta as a target of the same structural-rules argument the 2021 Profiling Children report opened on Facebook, and pre-figured the multi-platform framing the 2024 Not Just Algorithms report would generalise across the platform stack.

Not Just Algorithms: the four-systems frame (March 2024)

The campaign's largest single report is Not Just Algorithms, published in March 2024 with Rys Farthing as lead author and Dr Hannah Jarman of Deakin University as academic collaborator. The report's methodology was a systems-level audit across TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X, and Google's YouTube — using fake 16-year-old test accounts and standard pro-eating-disorder content as the test stimulus, the research team measured the behaviour of four named platform systems: the recommender system that surfaces content to users, the moderation system that decides what content is removed, the ad-approval system that decides what advertising is permitted to run, and the ad-management system that decides which users adverts are targeted at. The report's headline finding was that on X, 67 per cent of content recommended to the fake 16-year-old accounts was pro-eating-disorder content with a further 13 per cent self-harm imagery, with significant levels of pro-eating-disorder recommendation on the other tested platforms as well. The "not just algorithms" framing was the campaign's terminological pivot: from a recommender-only frame — which the 2022-era Australian platform-policy discourse had absorbed into the Online Safety file as an algorithm-transparency question — into a four-systems frame in which all four platform-side systems share responsibility for the harm pattern, and in which the policy answer accordingly has to address all four rather than the recommender alone. The four-systems frame supplied the substantive argument the campaign carried into the 2024 Online Safety Act review.

The Joint Select Committee on Social Media and Australian Society (2024)

On 9 July 2024 Executive Director Alice Dawkins and Director of Research and Policy Rys Farthing testified before the Joint Select Committee on Social Media and Australian Society, the Australian parliamentary inquiry convened to examine the impacts of social media on Australians. The Committee's final report of 18 November 2024 adopted the statutory duty-of-care framing that Reset.Tech Australia had been arguing for across its 2024 submissions to the Online Safety Act review, with twelve named recommendations including a statutory duty of care on platforms, mandatory data-access obligations to vetted independent researchers, algorithm-control rights for users, and strengthened obligations on platforms' handling of children's personal information. The B&T trade-press coverage of the Committee report named Dr Rys Farthing of Reset.Tech Australia as a key witness to the inquiry; the Committee report itself drew substantially on the Not Just Algorithms evidentiary record. The Joint Select Committee report is the campaign's principal parliamentary-side outcome and the artefact through which the campaign's structural-regulation argument crossed into the Australian parliamentary record at the level of named recommendations.

The Children's Online Privacy Code (2024–2026)

The campaign's principal policy destination is the Australian Children's Online Privacy Code mandated by the Privacy and Other Legislation Amendment Act 2024 and required to be registered by 10 December 2026. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner has run the Code consultation since 2024, with the 12 June 2025 Children's Online Privacy Code Issues Paper opening the substantive policy questions and the 31 March – 5 June 2026 Exposure Draft consultation running as the final pre-registration consultation stage. Reset.Tech Australia's August 2025 Children's Online Privacy Code and Targeted Advertising roundtable paper, drawing on a convened roundtable of 21 academic and civil-society experts, articulated the campaign's consolidated position that the Code should either prohibit the use of children's personal data for targeted advertising or operate a presumption against such use as the default. The roundtable paper is the campaign's principal artefact on the Code consultation file, and the OAIC's own Code landing page names the consultation Reset.Tech Australia has done with children and young people as an input to the Code's development. The Code is the legislative seam at which the Profiling Children for Advertising finding lands as enforceable Australian rule; the campaign's success across the wider arc will be measurable in significant part by how far the Code's final text moves in the direction the campaign argued for.

The social-media-ban counterpoint (2024–2025)

A distinguishing feature of the campaign's posture is its public opposition to the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024 — the Australian under-16 social media ban that was passed in late 2024 and entered force on 10 December 2025. Reset.Tech Australia co-signed an open letter against the ban with the Australian Child Rights Taskforce and other Australian children's-rights and digital-rights organisations, on the working argument that age-based social media bans are ineffective substitutes for systemic platform regulation, that they shift the policy burden onto children and parents rather than onto the platforms whose business model is the source of the harm, and that they crowd out the structural-regulation reform the campaign's main thread has argued for. The campaign therefore did not win its working argument across the whole Australian children's-online-safety file — the social media ban passed despite the campaign's opposition — but the open-letter stance is a deliberate part of the campaign's posture rather than a defeat to be absorbed: it clarifies that the campaign's demand is for platform-side structural rules, not for any policy that reduces children's online harm in any direction whatever.

Posture in the movement

The campaign's place in the make-AI-good corpus is as the most sustained and well-documented Australian civil-society research-and-policy campaign on the regulation of platform profiling, targeted advertising, and algorithmic recommendation of harmful content to children. Its working theory of change is that the platform business model is the upstream cause of the harm pattern the Australian regulatory file has called variously "online safety", "children's online privacy", and "algorithmic harm", and that the only credible answer is enforceable structural rules — a Children's Online Privacy Code with a "best interests" test, an Online Safety Act with a statutory duty of care, and platform-data-access obligations for vetted independent researchers. The five sequential investigative reports, the named government submissions, and the consultation-stage Code advocacy together constitute the campaign's evidentiary and policy record. Within the Australian civil-society landscape, the campaign is the principal pole engaging Australian young people, parents, parliamentarians, and children's-rights coalition partners in shaping how platforms and the AI systems built on top of them are deployed in the Australian children's-online-safety file.