Australia social media watchdog sees common cause with US as age ban begins

SYDNEY: The regulator overseeing Australia’s world-first teenage social media ban rejected the “technological exceptionalism” championed by mostly US-based platforms and said a groundswell of American parents wanted similar measures.

eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said Australia was entitled to restrict access to social media, just as it applied safety rules to any imported good, and added that many American parents had decried a lack of equivalent guardrails there.

The comments show the regulator framing the Australian law as a step toward a common goal and shrugging off complaints by some of the world’s biggest tech firms and senior U.S. lawmakers who have called the Australian law, with its corporate fines of up to A$49.5 million ($33 million), a threat to free speech.

Ahead of Australia’s law requiring social media platforms to block people under 16 taking effect on Wednesday, a U.S. congressional committee said it wants Inman Grant to testify, describing her as a foreign official challenging the First Amendment.

“I hear from the parents and the activists and everyday people in America, ’we wish we had an e-safety commissioner like you in America, we wish we had a government that was going to put tween and teen safety before technology profits,” Inman Grant said in an interview at her office in Sydney.

“There’s more that unites us than divides us,” added Inman Grant, who is American-born and worked in policy roles at Microsoft and Twitter before becoming Australia’s first internet regulator in 2017.

Already governments from Europe to Asia have said they plan similar steps to Australia amid rising concern about social media’s links to bullying, body image problems and radicalisation, all fuelled by what Inman Grant called a “system to keep stickiness through outragement”.

But the U.S. has bristled at attempted restrictions, with attempts by some states to impose an age minimum stalled by legal challenges. U.S. federal legislation which contains safety requirements for minors but no age minimum is yet to become law after three years.

That did not mean the U.S. would never follow Australia’s lead regarding online safety, said Inman Grant, adding that she had worked in the past year with the Department of Homeland Security to help build tools to stop the spread of child sexual abuse material.

The Take It Down Act, a U.S. law banning artificial intelligence-generated deepfakes, which was signed into law by President Donald Trump in May, “very much emulates what we’ve been doing here for eight years”, Inman Grant said.

Australia bans under-16s from social media in world-first crackdown

Regardless, she said, countries were entitled to impose safety standards on imported goods, from cars to medicine, and it was “technological exceptionalism” for platforms to say the same shouldn’t apply to them.

“There is no other consumer-facing industry in the world where we don’t expect them to make sure that there are safety standards,” she said.

“This is Australia calling time on social media and the deceptive and harmful design features tethering our children to their platforms.”

All 10 platforms covered by the ban - including Meta’s Instagram, TikTok, Snap’s Snapchat and Alphabet’s YouTube - have said they will comply, but Inman Grant acknowledged the challenge enforcing the law if the platforms ultimately violate it.

That may not matter.

“In my experience…sometimes it isn’t the regulation itself that is the impetus for doing the right thing,” she said.

“It’s often the reputational damage.”