eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant says her office will register three industry-prepared online safety codes to protect children from exposure to pornography and age-inappropriate content.
The codes, which cover enterprise hosting, internet carriage services and search engines, have been deemed to meet community expectations after being redrafted and lodged by local tech industry groups last month.
But Ms Inman Grant has sought further commitments from industry before registering five other proposed adult content codes, including those covering app stores, devices, social media and AI systems.
“If I’m not satisfied that these codes meet community safeguards, I will move to set mandatory standards,” the eSafety Commissioner said during a Press Club address on Tuesday.
eSafety has previously registered enforceable standards for the first phase of the codes for child sexual exploitation and pro-terror material, including one that mandates tech giants scan and remove child sexual abuse material from cloud storage services.
Ms Inman Grant revealed her position on the codes in a speech otherwise dominated by her recommendation that YouTube be included in the under-16s social media ban, which prompted backlash from the video sharing platform.
“YouTube was cited most frequently as the source of harmful content,” she said, noting recent reporting that the platform has weakened its own moderation processes. “It shows just how difficult it is to assess a platform’s safety at any fixed point in time.”
Likening the social media age ban to “red and yellow safety flags in the digital surf” and not a “great Australian firewall,” she confirmed that age assurance technologies can now identify underage users without verifying the age of everyone.
But she said there is “no silver bullet”, and that the legislation passed at a late night session of parliament last year was more about “creating friction in a system that has, until now, had none”.
A recent trial involving 53 participants showed there is no “substantial technological limitations” to privacy-preserving, effective age estimation, but that none of the technologies are “guaranteed to be effective”.
Ms Inman Grant downplayed questions on whether online safety reforms could strain its relationship with the Trump administration, arguing the issue was primarily one of diplomacy.
She noted that the US is itself undergoing a period of digital reckoning, with US President Trump yet again extending the TikTok ban deadline last week and the US Supreme Court soon expected to rule on the constitutionality of age verification laws.
Ms Inman Grant also used her speech on Tuesday to reveal plans to this week publish deepfake incident management plans developed to help schools respond to the growing misuse of generative AI tools that create explicit synthetic images.
“There isn’t a single week that goes by without a deepfake scandal in one of Australia’s schools,” she said. “These apps can be used by anyone with a smartphone, but the cost to the victim is lingering and incalculable.”
With Justin Hendry
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