Hundreds of Australians complain of wrongful social media account closures but ombudsman can’t help
More than 1,500 Australians in the past two-and-a-half years have complained to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman about digital platforms, with a third complaining about wrongful account terminations.But the TIO – which is responsible for complaints about mobile phone service, land lines and internet services – has no powers to do anything about it.The TIO’s report, released on Wednesday, comes before Australia’s social media ban, which will see teenagers under 16 banned from about 12 social media platforms from 10 December.The federal government has set out that the platforms must have quick appeals processes in place for people who have been wrongly assessed as being under 16 to regain access to their accounts.In the report, the TIO referred to Karen – not her real name – whose business page on social media was linked to her personal account.
It was used to manage advertising and communicating with customers.Sign up: AU Breaking News emailHer personal account was disabled without warning and she couldn’t contact customers via the business page as a result.She could not communicate with the platform to have the ban reversed because the response went to her disabled account.“She could find no other way to get help from them.Karen was worried about the financial and reputational damage to her business, so she contacted the TIO,” the report stated.
Karen is one of an increasing number of customers going to the TIO to report problems with social media,The TIO stated that between 1 January 2023 and 31 August 2025 consumers made 1,537 digital platform-related complaints,The TIO found also there had been a 28,6% increase in such complaints between 2023 and 2024,Guardian Australia has reported on similar account terminations made on Meta platforms in the past few months.
Issues with account access – including platforms blocking or banning users – made up 36% of the complaints reported.“We have heard from individuals and small businesses whose accounts have been locked due to alleged breaches of community standards, with no warning or explanation, risking personal and financial losses,” the TIO said.Google topped the digital platforms-related complaints to the TIO at 18%, followed by Kayo/Binge/Foxtel streaming company Hubbl at 15%, Apple and Microsoft at 14% of complaints each, and Meta (11%).The TIO found it was fielding these complaints because they often intersected with telecommunications issues – it can be difficult for customers to know whether an issue with a service is due to the platform itself, or an internet or connection problem.The ombudsman has recommended its remit be expanded to include digital platforms so they can respond to consumer complaints.
“We are calling for the Australian government to expand the TIO to become the communications ombudsman,” ombudsman Cynthia Gebert said.“To support government reforms such as the under-16s social media ban and digital duty of care, it’s more important than ever that people have appeal rights when digital platforms get things wrong.”She said it was heartbreaking to tell people they couldn’t resolve their problems with the TIO.“When someone loses access to their telco service, we work with the consumer and the company to resolve the issue,” she said.“But when someone is accidentally locked out of their social media or cloud storage account, and the platform is not responding, there’s nowhere for them to go.
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A Traitors cloak, Britpop Trumps and a very arty swearbox: it’s the 2025 Culture Christmas gift guide!
Put some artful oomph into your festive season with our bumper guide, featuring everything from a satanic South Park shirt to Marina Abramović’s penis salt and pepper potsThe Guardian’s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more.Is there an overly sweary person in your life? Do you have a friend who’s utterly bereft without The Traitors? Would anyone you know like to shake up their cocktail-making? And do you ever wish your neighbours’ doormat was, well, a bit more kinky?The Guardian’s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link
Comedian Judi Love: ‘I’m a big girl, the boss, and you love it’
Judi Love was 17 when she was kidnapped, though she adds a couple of years on when reliving it on stage. It was only the anecdote’s second to-audience outing when I watched her recite it, peppered with punchlines, at a late-October work-in-progress gig. The bones of her new show – All About the Love, embarking on a 23-date tour next year – are very much still evolving, but this Wednesday night in Bedford is a sell out, such is the pull of Love’s telly star power.She starts by twerking her way into the spotlight, before riffing on her career as a social worker and trading “chicken and chips for champagne and ceviche”. Interspersed are opening bouts of sharp crowd work – Love at her free-wheeling best
Fran Lebowitz: ‘Hiking is the most stupid thing I could ever imagine’
I would like to ask your opinion on five things. First of all, leaf blowers.A horrible, horrible invention. I didn’t even know about them until like 20 years ago when I rented a house in the country. I was shocked! I live in New York City, we don’t have leaf problems
My cultural awakening: Thelma & Louise made me realise I was stuck in an unhappy marriage
It was 1991, I was in my early 40s, living in the south of England and trapped in a marriage that had long since curdled into something quietly suffocating. My husband had become controlling, first with money, then with almost everything else: what I wore, who I saw, what I said. It crept up so slowly that I didn’t quite realise what was happening.We had met as students in the early 1970s, both from working-class, northern families and feeling slightly out of place at a university full of public school accents. We shared politics, music and a sense of being outsiders together
The Guide #219: Don’t panic! Revisiting the millennium’s wildest cultural predictions
I love revisiting articles from around the turn of the millennium, a fascinatingly febrile period when everyone – but journalists especially – briefly lost the run of themselves. It seems strange now to think that the ticking over of a clock from 23:59 to 00:00 would prompt such big feelings, of excitement, terror, of end-of-days abandon, but it really did (I can remember feeling them myself as a teenager, especially the end-of-days-abandon bit.)Of course, some of that feeling came from the ticking over of the clock itself: the fears over the Y2K bug might seem quite silly today, but its potential ramifications – planes falling out of the sky, power grids failing, entire life savings being deleted in a stroke – would have sent anyone a bit loopy. There’s a very good podcast, Surviving Y2K, about some of the people who responded particularly drastically to the bug’s threat, including a bloke who planned to sit out the apocalypse by farming and eating hamsters.It does seem funny – and fitting – in the UK, column inches about this existential threat were equalled, perhaps even outmatched, by those about a big tarpaulin in Greenwich
From Christy to Neil Young: your complete entertainment guide to the week ahead
ChristyOut now Based on the life of the American boxer Christy Martin (nickname: the Coal Miner’s Daughter), this sports drama sees Sydney Sweeney Set aside her conventionally feminine America’s sweetheart aesthetic and don the mouth guard and gloves of a professional fighter.Blue MoonOut now Richard Linklater (Before Sunrise) reteams with one of his favourite actors, Ethan Hawke, for a film about Lorenz Hart, the songwriter who – in addition to My Funny Valentine and The Lady Is a Tramp – also penned the lyrics to the eponymous lunar classic. Also starring Andrew Scott and Margaret Qualley.PillionOut now Harry Melling plays the naive sub to Alexander Skarsgård’s biker dom in this kinky romance based on the 1970s-set novel Box Hill by Adam Mars-Jones, here updated to a modern-day setting, and with some success: it bagged the screenplay prize in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes.Laura Mulvey’s Big Screen ClassicsThroughout DecemberRecent recipient of a BFI Fellowship, the film theorist Laura Mulvey coined the term “the male gaze” in a seminal 1975 essay, and thus transformed film criticism
Dryrobe wins trademark case against rival waterproof changing coat D-Robe
Budget uncertainty triggers plunge in UK construction activity; Trustpilot shares slump after short-seller claims – as it happened
Google’s AI Nano Banana Pro accused of generating racialised ‘white saviour’ visuals
Chatbots can sway political opinions but are ‘substantially’ inaccurate, study finds
US skier Ryan Cochran-Siegle kicks off Olympic push with Beaver Creek downhill podium
Joe Root is finally a wizard in Aus after Harry Brook’s Bazball scarecrow act | Barney Ronay