Australia has finally put its
social media ban for children under 16 into action. From Wednesday, platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook have been asked to block access for young users.
At the centre of this major move is Julie Inman Grant, the country’s eSafety Commissioner. She’s now the one responsible for enforcing the policy that aims to protect children online.
“While the tech industry moves backwards, we must move forwards,” she said recently. “We are seeking to create some friction [in the] system to protect children where previously there has been close to none … We are treating big tech like the extractive industry it has become.”
As the order kicked in, Prime Minister
Anthony Albanese also shared a message calling it “a day when families are taking back power.”
So, who is Julie Inman Grant? And what pushed her to back such a strict ban? Here’s a closer look.
Who is Julie Inman Grant?
Julie Inman Grant grew up in Seattle, US, raised by her single mother from the time she was five. She often says those early years taught her to be independent and tough. Her mother worked for the City of Seattle, a workplace that, she once told TIME magazine, even had Ted Bundy as a colleague back in the day.
Seattle is a tech hub, and after spending some time working in the 102nd US Congress, Grant eventually found her way into that world, too. She joined Microsoft, which has long been headquartered in the city and sits at the heart of its tech identity, alongside giants like Amazon.
Microsoft later sent her to Australia. She married Australian businessman Nick Grant in the early 2000s, and by 2012, the family had fully settled in Australia.
Over the next few years, she took on senior roles at Adobe and then Twitter. At Twitter, she built the company’s policy, safety and philanthropy programmes for Australia, New Zealand and Southeast Asia. But she left after two years. She has said she simply couldn’t keep defending the platform when it wasn’t doing enough to shield women and vulnerable users from targeted abuse.
She has also spoken about internal Meta documents that surfaced in US court discovery, materials that showed the company’s own researchers knew children were being harmed by their platforms.
“I was shocked to see one document from Meta where they referred to tweens as having a ‘herd mentality’,” she told The Guardian. “‘Go target them, get them on while they’re early, and then they’ll become adults someday.’”
“These aren’t just harmful and deceptive design features. There is a whole infrastructure and an ethos that is putting profits before child protections.”
To her, children never stand a fair chance against highly optimised social-media algorithms. Research from her office found that seven in 10 children aged 10 to 15 had come across harmful online content. For most, this included misogyny, violence, disordered eating or suicide-related material, usually seen on social media.
She says she is now seeing similar red flags with the rapid rise of
AI. “They’re behaving exactly the same way social media companies did 20 years ago: moving fast and breaking things, asking for forgiveness rather than permission,” she told the Sydney Morning Herald. She has also said that new rules for AI chatbots and “AI companions” are on the way in March.
Her public role began in 2017, when she became Australia’s eSafety Commissioner under Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. Four years later, she took charge of enforcing the Online Safety Act 2021, a first-of-its-kind law that allows her office to compel tech platforms to remove harmful content, including adult cyberbullying, within 24 hours. It’s now being used to deal with new kinds of online risks, including those fuelled by AI.
Her work has earned her national and global recognition. As per her website, she has been named one of Australia’s most influential women by the Australian Financial Review and listed as a leading Australian in foreign affairs by the Sydney Morning Herald.
In 2020, the World Economic Forum and Apolitical included her in the #Agile50, a group of global leaders who are reshaping how governments respond to fast-changing technology.
Challenges ahead for Grant
The legal pressure around the new rules is starting to build. The Australian Financial Review reported that Reddit is preparing a High Court challenge to the ban, arguing it restricts teenagers’ implied right to freedom of political communication.
The $67 billion platform has reportedly hired constitutional expert Perry Herzfeld, SC, along with law firm Thomson Geer, the same firm that has mounted several challenges to Grant’s rulings on behalf of Elon Musk’s X.
But Grant says none of this surprises her. “We know that some companies were briefing barristers,” she said. “Yes, I am prepared for that.”
Another challenge, brought by two teenagers and backed by the Digital Freedom Project, targets the legislation itself. “We’ll see what happens,” she said.
“If the court makes a decision, we’ll abide by it. It may be that the Commonwealth wins. It may be that some changes need to be made to the policy. Who knows? I’m just going to move forward, given there hasn’t been any legal constraint placed on us,” Grant said.
She was also recently summoned to testify before the US Congress by Republicans, who accuse her of “zealotry for global take-downs” and claim she attempted to “silence American speech” by “colluding” with GARM to “censor” the platform then known as Twitter. However, she has declined to appear.
With input from agencies
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