🇦🇺 Featured: Australian Social Media bans; What’s all this then!?
A cybersecurity dad shares how a 15‑year‑old young man he was caring for slipped from “funny memes and hustle clips” into darker manosphere/incel spaces. Within months, the behaviour shifts were unmissable. He tried everything he knew: filters, DNS, device swaps, and still couldn’t outpace the algorithmic pull and peer channels.
Why share this now?
Because Australia’s new social‑media age rules (under‑16) go live on December 10. Platforms will be required to take reasonable steps to prevent under‑16s from holding accounts. If this resonates, help us build: we’re running an eSafety Hackathon to prototype education, tooling and reporting ideas that actually help parents, teachers and teens.
🗞️ This Week’s Line-Up
News: The Great Aussie AI Divide
Startup Spotlight👀 - PaxMod
AI Tools
Podcast Pick
Upcoming events
Hacks, meetups and AI sessions, community energy’s peaking.Question of the Week
Answer to unlock exciting surprises.
AI & Startup Memes (dank?)
1️⃣ The Great Aussie AI Divide
Looks like Australia’s got an “AI haves and have-nots” problem.
A new InnovationAus survey found 45.6% of Aussies have used generative AI, but that number hides a big split:
Nearly 70% of 18- to 34-year-olds are all-in.
Only 15% of 65- to 74-year-olds have even tried it.
And regional Australia? Still lagging, not for lack of interest, but bandwidth, training, and trust.
Here’s the real kicker: we’re sprinting ahead in innovation but leaving half the country behind in adoption.
Why it matters
If we keep building for tech insiders, we’re cutting ourselves off from the biggest market in the country - everyone else.
The Takeaway
Founders, this is your greenfield. Build for the next billion non-techies.
Make AI useful, safe, and dead-simple - and you’ll own the next growth curve.
Read more → InnovationAus: Australia’s AI Divide
Read the full CSIRO/Industry Report → Australia’s AI Ecosystem
⭐ Startup Highlight of the Week
👉 Check out PaxMod here. 🗓 Help us make the internet safer for kids: 💼 Alan is hiring!
Want to have your startup featured? 🤷♀️ → Click here
🛠️ New AI Tools You Should Try
Claude for Excel – Plug Claude into your spreadsheets and ask natural-language questions like “show me last quarter’s trending region” and get instant charts + commentary.
Atlas – Visualise your data in maps, graphs, and dashboards with a few clicks. Spot hidden clusters, outliers, and patterns you were blind to before.
Gemini Build – Build apps with fewer lines of code and more idea-motion. Draft an app concept, select UI elements, and quickly deploy a prototype.
Extra tool: Promptify – Manage your prompts like code: version control, A/B test results, scoring dashboards, and collaborative editing. (Bonus for the builders among you.)
🎧 Podcast Picks
“I Couldn’t Block It: Cybersecurity Dad vs Online Extremes” – MLAI
In this episode you’ll hear:
• How “innocent” hustle videos and memes escalated into misogynistic, more extreme content.
• Why Andrew‑Tate‑style influencers resonate with boys — and the role of recommendations.
• Why removing devices can increase risk — and what signs to watch at home/school.
• What parents and teachers actually need (education, tooling, and community support).
📅 Upcoming Events
MLAI x Stone & Chalk Monthly Saturday Co-working Day
🗓 15 Nov 2025 | ⏰ 09:00 AM | 📍 Stone & Chalk, 121 King St, Melbourne VIC
Bring your laptop, coffee, and ideas. Work with (and riff off) other AI builders, founders, and coders in the community.
👉 RSVP here🚀 Needle In The Hashtag
🗓 Sat & Sun 29 -30th November 2025 | 📍 Stone & Chalk, Melbourne CBD
Dive into a live challenge to spot hoaxes, hazards, and harmful content in a simulated social network. Work alongside mentors, use curated datasets, and craft detection tools, safety UX, and trust systems. Ship a working prototype that actually makes feeds safer, especially for kids and vulnerable users, and compete for real prizes along the way.
Kickoff & Team Formation Night - eSafety Hackathon 🍻
🗓 Wednesday 26 November 2025 | ⏰ 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM | 📍 Stone & Chalk Melbourne Startup Hub, Melbourne VIC 3004
No slides, no pitch-fest. Just AI people, ideas, and cocktails.
👉 Get your ticketHow To Use AI To Hack Your Way To Page #1 Of Google
🗓 Dec 6th 2025 | ⏰ 10:00 AM – 2:00 PM | 📍 Stone & Chalk
Want your startup on page one of Google without spending months guessing what to write? Come spend a Saturday with us and learn a fast, practical system that actually works. We’ll give you code for AI agents that learn what you do, and capture spot #1 on Google search while you sleep
This event is EXPENSIVE ($100/ticket) because we’ll actually give you code and agents that we spent months working on. If you’re a struggling founder/student write me an email (sam@mlai.au) with why you need hella discounts and I’ll give a scholarship to a few peeps.
🗓 7th–21st February 2026
Australia’s most chaotic health-tech hackathon is back. Team up with coders, clinicians, and data nerds to solve real medical challenges and push digital health beyond buzzwords.
👉 Early Bird tickets here.
💼 Jobs in Tech (This Week)
Developers - Lyra (Flexible)
Lyra is looking for talented (cracked) engineers to join their Melbourne team. What they want:
- 2 years coding experience (personal projects count)
- Excitement for fast-paced startup life
- Good communication skills (English)
- Ambition & passion
Developer – Parsewave (Remote / Flexible)
Help build advanced datasets to train the next generation of coding AI systems. If you’re comfortable with Linux, Docker, Python and CLI workflows, and you’ve got GitHub or a personal site, this could be your next move.
❓ Question of the Week
If you could have one AI tool that understands your emotional state and responds accordingly, what would it be and why?
Drop your thoughts in the comments, the most original answer gets a surprise from us 😉
🦘 MLAI Memes
