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eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant is seeking new powers to target the revenue of social media giants in order to curb their hosting of graphic, often violent, content. By Karen Barlow.
eSafety Commissioner: ‘We are testing our powers’
Julie Inman Grant is seeking greater powers to hit “recalcitrant” tech giants where it most hurts: their revenue.
Speaking in the week that Australia’s terror threat level was raised from “possible” to “probable”, the eSafety Commissioner highlighted the need for new powers to force the big social media companies to restrict graphic content, to stem the spread of misinformation and disinformation and to protect younger users.
“Even though we have the powers to remove terrorist and violent extremist content material, we can’t just be playing a big game of Whac-A-Mole. The internet is awash with this kind of content,” Inman Grant tells The Saturday Paper.
As possible penalties for breaching Australia’s rules, laid out in the Online Safety Act, she proposes cutting revenue from ads and the ability to make money from the personal data of social media users.
“We are testing our powers. We need to build more capacity around legal, but we’re going to need enforcement powers that have real teeth, possibly business disruption powers, because we have found that regulation per se and a slap on the wrist is not enough to really move some of these companies to change their behaviour and/or their business model,” Inman Grant says.
“It’s the reputational impact and anything that disrupts revenue that will make them make those meaningful changes.”
Meanwhile, senior public servant Delia Rickard is leading a review into the act to ensure it is fit for purpose in a fast-moving space. The review’s findings are expected to be submitted to the government by the end of October.
“One of the issues that they’ll be looking at are enforcement mechanisms,” says Inman Grant. “The quantum of fines that we’re able to give are paltry vis-a-vis the Europeans and the UK, who now have the Digital Services Act and the Online Safety Act. So, they’ve kind of leapfrogged us there.”
The act’s shortcomings were highlighted in the eSafety Commissioner’s battle with social media platforms in April to take down images from the stabbing attacks in Sydney’s Christ the Good Shepherd Church in Wakeley and a Bondi Junction shopping centre.
The office of Communications Minister Michelle Rowland told The Saturday Paper that “ensuring the safety of all Australians online is a key priority of the Albanese Government”, which is “taking decisive action on a number of fronts to minimise online harms, whilst boosting the transparency and accountability of online platforms”.
This week’s terror threat upgrade comes amid violent unrest across the United Kingdom, as the far right seized on the stabbing deaths of three young girls to generate a wave of disinformation. In Austria, Taylor Swift concerts were targeted, police say, by a teenager radicalised on the internet, and others have been cancelled due to a terrorist threat. In announcing the upgrade, the ASIO director-general, Mike Burgess, warned that young Australians were particularly vulnerable to falling down a “rabbit hole of hate”.
Inman Grant has held the role of eSafety Commissioner for nearly eight years. She is no newcomer to the industry she is grappling with, as a former manager of public policy at Twitter and global director of privacy and internet safety at Microsoft.
She describes the deterioration of checks and balances among the social media giants that have made her role so much more challenging.
“At X Corp, one of the first steps Elon Musk took was to basically excise 80 per cent of the test and safety engineers, more than half of the content moderators and 80 per cent of their public policy staff, while at the same time letting 62,000 formerly permanently banned users on the platform.
“If you remove all the digital first responders, the law enforcement, and you open up the jail and let people through, what do you expect you’re going to get?”
It is not just X.
“We’ve seen Meta acquire one of the best social media monitoring tools that was out in the market at the time, CrowdTangle, so that researchers and NGOs could be able to measure the toxicity and sentiment analysis on these platforms,” Inman Grant says.
“They acquired it and then they killed it.”
Meta is replacing CrowdTangle, which it claims can’t completely and concisely measure viral Facebook content, with its own Meta Content Library. The crossover is happening just as the US presidential election heats up.
She describes the “deep personal cost” of her battle with the social platforms following the Wakeley stabbing. It was the first time the takedown orders had been tested in a court of law and a further test for how online viral content is classified under a system set up for produced movies and TV content.
Inman Grant says it takes 30 days for the Classification Board to classify content eSafety sends them – five days if it’s expedited.
“One of the reasons we took action against Wakeley was that it was a very high impact, very violent – gratuitously violent –video of a deemed terrorist incident,” Inman Grant says.
When the formal removal notices were issued, she says, Meta replied within an hour and X Corp responded that it would take it up in court “even though it probably, in all likelihood, violated their own policies on violent speech”. “And, of course, they remove global content like that all the time,” Inman Grant says.
X contended the Australian takedown action was “unlawful and dangerous” to freedom of speech and that the eSafety Commissioner did not have the authority to “dictate” what content X users could see globally.
The eSafety Commissioner pulled out of the court proceedings against X Corp and later revealed she had been the subject of death threats and doxxing of her family members.
Inman Grant has, however, sent her original decision over to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal for an independent merits review. “It’s not the end of it,” she says. “We’ll test some of the powers and the way we exercise them through the AAT.”
“One of the things I think the online safety review will be looking at is, should we just accept that there should be a new kind of harms scheme for online content that is created by users, terrorist content or rape or kidnapping, content that is meant to go viral? Can we accept that that needs to be classified in a different way than the movies?”
“The point is, children are seeing this content. It’s confronting. They cannot unsee it. It desensitises. It normalises, and in some cases, it radicalises.”
The problem is not only with what is posted online. It is also encrypted messaging and cloud storage services that are being used to hide child abuse and terror content. eSafety has been trying to force companies to find, remove and disrupt such material.
In the face of tech-sector concern about surveillance overreach by the government, the commissioner has lodged new online safety standards in parliament that pull back from asking companies to break encryption or undertake measures not “technically feasible” or “reasonably practical”.
The eSafety Commissioner said the vast majority of companies were complying with her requests, but platforms existed where child abuse images and terrorist content were openly shared and distributed.
“As more governments are demanding transparency, more companies are trying to become more opaque,” she says.
Like-minded countries are banding together to expose what is and what is not being done to increase online safety. A group called the Global Online Safety Regulators Network now has 10 regulators from countries such as France, Ireland and South Africa working on regulatory coherence and enforcement.
Like Australia, the European Commission has faced legal threats from X Corp and owner Elon Musk.
“There are some really recalcitrant actors,” Inman Grant says, recalling journalist and Nobel Peace Prize-winner Maria Ressa’s comment that “the new global dictators” are not just the political dictators, they are the technology billionaires.
One solution to the social media challenge that both the prime minister and the opposition leader are embracing is social media bans for young people.
Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton have separately landed on 16 years as a reasonable age limit to access platforms, with the opposition leader vowing to bring such a ban within 100 days of a Coalition government being elected.
The Liberal leader, who regards the tech giants as seeing themselves as “above the law”, says he is ready to give the eSafety Commissioner further powers if required.
Albanese sees a need for an “important national conversation” about age limits. “Social media has a social responsibility,” he told reporters in June.
“I want to make sure that the interests of young people in particular are looked after.”
Inman Grant is wary of what she calls a “blunt force” approach, however.
“That may be a sign of the times, that politicians, parents and others just want to effectively turn off the social media, which unfortunately, in practice, is not something that will necessarily be easy or potentially possible to implement and enforce,” she says.
Social media users on the main platforms such as TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook, X and Instagram have to be 13 years old to create an account, but the digital age of consent is widely ignored and not effectively enforced. Last year the eSafety Commissioner gave the Albanese government a road map for a stronger age-verification regime, which led to funding for a $6.5 million pilot of age-assurance technologies in the May budget.
South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas believes a ban should be set at 14, an age backed by Queensland Health. New South Wales Premier Chris Minns is backing 16 and will hold a major social media summit in October.
Inman Grant prefers a coordinated national approach over a patchwork of settings and favours a deeper discussion with evidence over political slogans. “When we say ban social media, what do we mean?” she says. “Because kids aren’t posting to Facebook anymore like we may be, they’re using short-form video, they’re using ephemeral apps. They’re using end-to-end encryption messaging apps.”
“So, are we going to look at banning all of that? If you are looking at banning all of that, then you probably have to ban devices as well. How do you enforce that?”
“I think it’s a very simplistic debate to date. We need to talk a little bit more about the nitty-gritty.”
There are also the unintended consequences of pushing young people to darker recesses of the web when a ban is in place, while vulnerable teens may miss out on protective benefits online, the ability to connect and find their “tribes”.
“I think we want to harness the benefits and minimise the risks, but we also want to teach our kids digital literacy,” she says.
She cites a recent UK study that found almost 38 per cent of parents help their children between the ages of eight and 12 get on social media sites and messaging apps before they’re ready.
The study also found almost half of kids aged eight to 15 have a user age of 16-plus. “This also goes back to how much more time are kids spending online,” the eSafety Commissioner says. “Do we know what they’re looking at? Do we know what we’re doing? Are we allowing them to be on devices for hours at a time and have a sense of what they’re looking at? Are we engaged with their online lives?”
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on August 10, 2024 as "Inman Grant: ‘We are testing our powers’".
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