Australia’s eSafety commissioner takes fight against harmful online behaviour into the school ground

The eSafety Commissioner is taking the fight against harmful online behaviour into the schoolground by launching deepfake incident management plans in Australian schools.

Mandatory standards will also take effect this week to ensure tech firms act to tackle “high impact harmful material”.

Commissioner Julie Inman-Grant told the National Press Club the rise of deepfake pornography and online sex abuse was “deeply concerning” and increasingly young people were either seeing, creating or sharing it.

Ms Inman-Grant flagged troubling language becoming “commonplace”, such as the acronym “kys” to encourage someone to “go kill yourself”.

“We’ve started to issue end user notices to Australians as young as 14 for hurling unrelenting rape and death threats at their female peers,” she said.

Another worrying trend investigators discovered was a 1300 per cent increase in reports of teens and young adults experiencing sexual extortion in three years.

“Sexual extortion is reaching crisis proportions,” she said.

“We have seen a 60 per cent surge of child sexual extortion over the past 18 months, targeting 13 to 15-year-olds.

“But we’ve also seen an increase in reports from 16 to 17-year-old boys.”

She also called for more age restriction guardrails for AI, saying “powerful, cheap and accessible AI models” were out “in the wild” in Australia and presenting “further hazard” to children.

Three new industry codes, designed to limit children’s access to pornography, violent content, themes of suicide and disordered eating, were announced.

Ms Inman-Grant also warned that no social media platform should be exempted from an under-16s ban as avenues to harm young people were becoming increasingly “dynamic”.

She clarified that her recommendation to include more platforms, which prompted a scathing response from YouTube, went beyond the video-sharing site, using Whatsapp as another example.

“This wasn’t just about YouTube. Our recommendation was that no specific platform would be exempted,” she said.

She said social media platforms were “all blurring” by adding an array of new functions where harm could occur, such as AI chatbots, short-form videos and comment threads.

“The relative risks and harms can change at any given moment, as well as the different features they incorporate. They’re all blurring,” she said.

“Even WhatsApp now is offering channels and advertising. This is a dynamic field and we have to be able to stay ahead.”

She said it was down to Communications Minister Anika Wells to decide which platforms were included. Ms Wells was notably absent from Tuesday’s address.

It’s understood that the Albanese Government is considering axing YouTube’s exemption which was initially indicated by former communications minister Michelle Rowland late last year.

Ms Inman-Grant said the Google video platform had been in her sights after surveying of and reports on young people had found it was one of the top online harm hotspots.

“YouTube was the most frequently cited platform in our research, with almost four in 10 children reporting this close to harmful content there,” she said.

The Commissioner’s advice was provided last week and published on Monday after Ms Wells sought her independent safety advice on the draft rules.

Throughout her address, Ms Inman-Grant had rejected it was a “ban”, claiming it did “not involve technology mandate but will likely require a waterfall of effective tools and techniques” to keep kids safe.

Ms Inman-Grant said further consultation would launch this week and labelled it the “one of the most complex and novel pieces of legislation the eSafety has ever implemented”.

“Esafety will start consulting upon our regulatory framework this week, and we will use this very feedback to further hone our regulatory guidance under the legislation,” she said.

“Over the next few months, we will be talking to over 150 stakeholders, including industry, academics, advocates, right groups, parents and, most importantly, young people themselves.

“There are key milestones that have now been reached and more coming just over the horizon that are bringing us closer to the minimum age obligation taking effect.”

She also used the address to announce three new industry codes designed to limit children’s access to pornography, violent content, themes of suicide, and disordered eating.

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