Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has pledged to introduce a minimum age of 16 for Australian social media users and an age verification system within the first 100 days he is in office if he is to win government.

Last year, this masthead reported the Liberal leader promised an age-verification plan to guard against dangers on the web if elected. In April, this masthead also revealed the Coalition wanted young children to be blocked from social media to protect them from violent content amid Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s feud with billionaire Elon Musk over X’s refusal to take down footage of the Sydney church stabbing.

Speaking on Seven’s Sunrise this morning, Dutton further outlined how the Coalition’s proposed system would work through using technology to verify a user’s age to access social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram.

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“It’s best to look at it from a parent’s perspective and parents want some rules in place,” he said.

“I think this is a sensible measure, there’s a lot of technology in place to help with the age verification that’s not going to take people’s data.”

Dutton said to get this policy to work, he would not be intimidated by companies such as Elon Musk’s X.

“We want the same rules and the same laws that apply in real life to apply online and I don’t think it’s good enough for us to say that we’ve got a massive spike in the number of mental health instances that these companies need to be pressures and if we do nothing, the red lines continue to be crossed,” he said.

“I think we can work with the technology companies. We can work through the tax system or whatever is required to budge these companies into an outcome.”