eSafety Commissioner says Australia needs private right of action for those harmed online

eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant says Australia needs a broader, better-equipped response to online abuse — including a private right of action for those harmed online.

Ms Inman-Grant expressed concerns that the current tool kit for eSafety wasn’t adaptable for emerging harms in her last Senate Estimates hearing in the online regulator role she’s held for a decade.

“In this highly charged environment, our complaint schemes are not designed to operate at the velocity and scale at which abuse is hurled or to tackle the opaque algorithms amplifying it,” she said on Tuesday.

“And that is why I believe eSafety needs a range of interventions — a digital duty of care but also stronger tools and protections for individuals, including a private right of action and legislation tailored to increasingly violent and threatening online hate.

“Social media is no longer the once envisioned, digital town square, it has become more like a gladiatorial arena.”

Her calls to giving Australians the right to sue tech companies for online harms had been a demand of the Greens in new digital safety laws.

Communications Minister Anika Wells also told her recent National Press Club address that Labor was open to including the individual legal avenue in their Digital Duty of Care bill.

Ms Wells had acknowledged the success of “private right of action” laws in the US in pushing tech companies to make their platforms safer and said it was an option she would consider during negotiations.

The new legislation to enhance online safety with an aim to push the onus on tech companies to proactively protect against online harms was introduced earlier this month.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Tuesday delivered a speech to Parliament framing the case for stronger regulation to members and senators with just one joint-sitting week left before summer break.

“Please examine what is in this bill. Please do not be distracted by what is not in this bill,” the PM told the House of Representatives on Tuesday.

“This is sensible reform. I say to everyone in the House and the Senate, please examine your conscience.

“Australian parents and the Australian people want the measures in this bill passed.”

The PM’s bid to persuade parliament comes after calls from across the aisle to end discourse designed to stoke division and violence in the wake of an allegedly deliberate attack on Indi MP Helen Haines.

Ms Inman Grant said on Tuesday that she and her family have faced online abuse for years, and that such abuse has become wrongly treated as part of public service.

She said abuse directed at women in public life were often personal, sexual in nature and escalated to include their children.

“What has become increasingly clear is that abuse manifests differently against women and girls than it does against men. It’s sexualised. It’s violent,” she said.

“It includes rape threats against the target, and death threats against her children.

“It goes after her age, her appearance, her weight, her supposed virtue, and even her fertility.

“It has a purpose to silence women to drive them from online spaces and ultimately out of public life.

“Violent and targeted online abuse intended to cause serious harm is not a product of free expression. It is designed to suppress speech.”

Ms Inman Grant said there had been a 57 per cent surge in adult cyber abuse reported to eSafety in the last reporting period between July 2025 and June 2026.

There were more than 9000 reports of imaged-based abuse, 3688 youth cyber-bullying cases, and 27,581 complaints of illegal and restricted content.

When sharing recent achievements in the role, Ms Inman Grant said regulatory action had prompted eight overseas nudifying services to end access in Australia.

She also revealed that the apps, produce deepfake nude images of real people using generative AI, had attracted about 200,000 monthly Australian downloads when they had been accessible.

Liberal Senator Sarah Henderson had been critical of eSafety’s decision not to release a further compliance update on the under-16s social media ban as it had in March.

Instead, as the one-year anniversary approaches on December 10 - the online regulator claims it will release an in-depth report reviewing “the impact of the social media ban on the lives of Australians”.

Greens leader David Shoebridge said big tech platforms were “utterly untrustable” and agreed with the approach to allow for “sock puppet” profiles to aid regulation.

The sock puppet account provision, which legally allows for approved researchers to create fake online identities, has been seen as controversial and labelled an overreach by several conservative politicians.

Senator Henderson has repeatedly attacked the bill as an attempt as “censorship” by Labor, describing it as a Labor “Trojan horse” designed to “impose political censorship”.

Her concerns about freedom of speech were echoed by One Nation leader Pauline Hanson and outspoken American free-speech activist Michael Shellenberger.

Senator Shoebridge, however, argued puppet accounts were common practise and “critically important” in Europe for researchers to hold big tech platforms to account.

“They test these platforms in real time, and they have been critically important to holding these platforms to account,” he said.

“For those politicians, who trust Elon Musk. For those politicians who trust big tech. Maybe they don’t want this? Maybe they’re quite happy having big tech self-regulated, make untested assertions.

“My party believes there needs to be a way to not just trust, but to verify. And we can see a rationale behind this.”

Ms Inman Grant said they were needed to combat challenges with emerging issues, listing artificial intelligence and platforms becoming less transparent.

She said regulators can no longer rely on company assurances and must independently verify whether safety protections actually work in practice.

“I think we’re past the stage of ‘we ask you a question, give us an answer and we’ll just take you at your word’. Many of these platforms are becoming more opaque,” she said.

“And in the age and complexity of AI, we’re absolutely going to… need to adversarially test the prompts.”

She then referenced a UK “Tech Against Terrorism” report which warned AI models were failing counter-terrorism safety benchmarks and of an obliteration of safeguards from open-weight models in less than three days.

While Ms Inman Grant will likely appear before a Senator inquiry into the new laws, she used her last estimates session to thank the parliament over her decade serving as the eSafety Commissioner.

“I will not be the individual that is implementing the digital duty of care. Of course, we will have great continuity with this (eSafety executive) team,” she said.

“In closing, it has been the honour of my professional life to serve as Australia’s Safety Commissioner for the past decade, leading the world’s first online safety regulator.”

Among others, she listed digital-literacy and online-safety education programs, forcing AI-powered nudifying services to leave Australia, proceedings against Telegram over alleged failures to remove pro-terror material, and enforceable undertakings with Roblox to strengthen child protections as key achievements.