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POLITICO Tech
Lawmakers worry about kids on social media. Australia just banned them.
00:29:40
While U.S. lawmakers debate kids’ online safety legislation, elected officials in Australia have already taken bold action — banning minors under age 16 from social media altogether. Now, Australian officials will spend the next year figuring out how to implement the law. Among them is eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, an American and former tech executive who oversees online safety regulation in Australia. On POLITICO Tech, Inman Grant tells host Steven Overly about Australia’s new social media experiment and why the whole world is watching.
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- [00:02]
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- [00:31]
Stephen Overlea
Hey, welcome back to Politico tech. Today's Friday, December 13th. I'm Stephen Overlea. Making kids safer online, especially on social media, where they can encounter all types of harmful content, is a huge focus for lawmakers in the U.S. we, we talked about the Kids Online Safety act on this show a couple days ago, if you need to get up to speed. But in Australia, elected officials are taking even bolder action. Actually, it's the boldest in the world and it's a ban. Late last month, Australian lawmakers banned minors under age 16 from using social media altogether. They cited its addictive properties and potential to harm mental health to make their case. That law will go into effect a year from now and there is a lot to figure out before then, like how to define social media, how to verify ages and how companies will comply. Julie Inman Grant will have to come up with some of those answers. She's Australia's E safety Commissioner, putting her in charge of online safety regulations. It's a job she's had since 2017, back when she was the only official in the world with that title. She's also an American who worked inside those tech companies for years. On the show today, Commissioner Inman Grant tells me about Australia's new social media experiment and why the world is is watching. Here's our conversation. Commissioner Inman Grant, welcome to Politico Tech.
- [02:22]
Julie Inman Grant
Thank you and thank you for having me.
- [02:24]
Stephen Overlea
Of course. Let's start with this law that Australia recently passed, effectively banning minors under the age of 16 from social media. It's a significant step. Australia is the first country to take it. Why is this necessary?
- [02:38]
Julie Inman Grant
Right, well, Australia was also the first country in the world to establish an independent online safety regulator in 2015. When I joined in early 2017, it was the children's Safety commissioner. And we really started with a range of functions that used to exist across government dealing with online child safety, including being Australia's hotline. We take reports of child sexual abuse material, but what was set up separately was a unique, unique child cyberbullying schemes. So when a child is intimidated Threatened, harassed or humiliated, they report to a social media site. If it isn't taken down, we service that safety net and they or their parents can report to us. And we have a 90% success rate in terms of getting that down.
- [03:25]
Stephen Overlea
So you hear all the time from parents and from kids experiencing some type of harm online, connect that work, then to this social media band, keeping kids under 16 off of social media. Why is that a necessary step?
- [03:40]
Julie Inman Grant
Right. Well, I think in many respects our government felt that the safety changes and improvements across the technology industry had been incremental rather than monumental. And I think there's been a global movement that frankly started with Jonathan Hyde spoke the anxious generation. One of our premiers who was like a governor, his wife read the book and, you know, he came out and said, I want parental consent for kids at the age of 14. And then another state premier said, well, I want to do this, but ban kids at the age of 16. And then every state and territory had a different plan. And then what happened was the head of the opposition party, Peter Dutton, said, we have an upcoming election. If the coalition comes in, we will institute a ban in 100 days. And then News Corp, which is a, you know, very powerful force in the Australian media landscape, was running a campaign around keeping kids safe. And so there was huge political momentum. And, you know, I think the Prime Minister felt social media is not showing the social responsibility we think they need to, that there's a social license we need to protect kids. What they've done to date is not enough, I guess I'd also say I don't really refer to it as a social media ban.
- [05:03]
Stephen Overlea
How do you refer to it?
- [05:05]
Julie Inman Grant
A social media restriction bill. Okay. There are a lot of exemptions, which I think are important. And what we'll be working through with our minister and the government now is what do they consider social media? I mean, kids aren't posting to Facebook and Instagram like they were 10 years ago. There's ephemeral media like in Snap, there's short form videos. A lot of the messaging apps that we see today are, you know, more closely resembling social media sites. If you look at WhatsApp, it's got stories and it's got channels. And then online gaming platforms, of course, are facilitating social interaction through chat and through live play. So we've got to figure out who's in and out in terms of who will be impacted and then what the requirement will be. Once we determine that, I should take a step back and say that we, as a regulator, worked for two years on an age verification roadmap.
- [06:05]
Stephen Overlea
I wanted to ask about this because that's my first thought. Anyone who has been around teens or knows teens knows they can find a workaround to a lot of roles. Right. So how do you verify age? How do you actually make sure this works?
- [06:20]
Julie Inman Grant
Right. Well, I've been working on age verification in one way, shape, or form since 2008. I think you probably remember those. The Harvard Berkman center had an Internet safety technical task force where they looked at this. And I distinctly remember a quote from Richard Blumenthal, the senator today, who was the attorney general then, well, if we can put a man on the moon, we can certainly verify the age of a child. And on one hand, that made me chuckle. On the other hand, I'm like, he's right. Except it's not just a technological issue. It's an ecosystem issue. And what we've seen over the past decade and a half is that ecosystem and that industry around safety, tech, and age assurance really maturing. So there are a range of different tools out there. Obviously, biometrics can be used, some form of government ID or digital id, Although for this particular bill, digital ID or government ID can't be the sole way of looking at this. So what I mean by the ecosystem is we need to make sure that we're balancing the imperatives of safety in terms of preventing children from accessing social media sites, particularly where there are addictive features like endless scroll, where there are opaque algorithms sending people down rabbit holes, where there is no visibility or explanation as to why they're being served particularly harmful content, for instance. But there are a range of other things that need to be considered, but we need to balance the privacy with the safety.
- [08:03]
Stephen Overlea
Some of the criticisms of the law, which I'm sure you've heard, especially from social media companies, you know, they've said it's government overreach or it's, you know, suppressing free speech. Why is it sort of the government's place to make some of these decisions and not parents or school administrators or tech companies?
- [08:22]
Julie Inman Grant
Well, interestingly, the real political momentum did come from parents who feel like it's just too hard. I mean, 95% of parents tell us, you know, if you're a social media site that has 50 different parental controls, you're lucky to be able to figure out how to toggle on one or two. So for too long, the burden for safety has fallen on the parents themselves or the children, rather than the platforms. So the way that the government designed this is to put the burden on platforms. And after we establish who's in and who's out and what technologies can be used, I will have to develop something called the reasonable steps that companies will have to take. And you make a really good point about freedom of speech and freedom of expression. We've done a lot of research, particularly with vulnerable communities, LGBTQI youth, those with disabilities and who are neurodivergent, and first nations youth. So, on the one hand, all of these groups, because they're marginalized, receive higher degrees of online hate. But they also say to us, being online makes us feel more ourselves than we are in the real world. We're able to find our tribe, we're able to connect and learn more about ourselves. And, you know, my commitment to the young people of Australia, and we have a youth advisory council that actually input into this process, is that we're not trying to cut kids off. We still will give them the ability to be able to use messaging, apps, and online gaming, where, you know, there are certainly some risk there, but there are a lot of healthy problem solving and connection that can happen in those fora too.
- [10:08]
Stephen Overlea
Got it. And so you talk to a lot of global regulators, counterparts in other countries. I mean, is this law something you think others should emulate?
- [10:16]
Julie Inman Grant
Well, listen, in many ways it is a big experiment because it hasn't been done before. We're not new to implementing novel and complex legislation. When this law came out, I'm independent, so I raised concerns about what I thought was quite a bold and decisive move because we do have mandatory codes and standards and transparency powers and complaint schemes, and we also have extensive prevention and education materials. But I described the water safety approaches that Australia has been so successful in doing over the past few decades, and that's because there were a lot of very tragic drownings in backyard pools. So Australia was one of the first countries to make sure that fencing was required for every pool, and it's backed by enforcement. But we haven't tried to fence the ocean. In some ways, that's futile.
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Stephen Overlea
Right.
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Julie Inman Grant
But what we do do is we teach kids to swim at the earliest age and to become strong swimmers throughout their lives before we let them go without supervision. We have lifeguards. We teach them to swim between the flags where we know there are sharks. We put up shark nets. We teach them, if you want to think about algorithmic rips. We teach them how to swim against rips so they don't get taken out to sea or so tired that they can't swim back to shore. So all of these things should be applied to online safety, I believe as well. And so again, that's part of our commitment as we implement this legislation as well. Digital literacy, algorithmic literacy. Making sure that we're preparing these kids for the online worlds that they're going to inhabit will continue to be a.
- [12:00]
Stephen Overlea
Feature which is the online world is its own ocean of sharks and riptides and everything else. I appreciate the metaphor. You know, if our listeners can't tell from your accent you're an American and you started your career on Capitol Hill. I know you spent a number of years at Microsoft and other tech companies. How does an American become the top online safety regulator in Australia?
- [12:22]
Julie Inman Grant
Well, it's funny you ask. I have people ask me all the time, did you always dream of being the Australian esafety commissioner? I'm like, no. I grew up on an island off of Seattle and I did listen to men at work and the hoodoo gurus and my teenage years and definitely in excess, but I never thought I was going to end up there. I mean, there's been a lot of serendipity in landing here. I came to Washington D.C. in 1991 with big ideals and even bigger hair and big shoulder pads too. And I worked for my hometown congressman. I was working on a range of social issues and he looked over the cubicle one day and said, for one, we're breaking up the baby bells. But we also have this small little company in our electorate called Microsoft. So on tech and telecom issues. So this was before there was even an Internet.
- [13:08]
Stephen Overlea
Wow.
- [13:08]
Julie Inman Grant
And then I was recruited to be one of Microsoft's first lobbyists here in Washington D.C. in 1995. So for my sins, I helped shape the Communications Decency act, working with groups like cdt. Now the big end of town at that time was Microsoft, AOL, CompuServe, AltaVista.
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Stephen Overlea
Netscape, Novell, Internet 1.0 companies.
- [13:33]
Julie Inman Grant
Exactly. And we truly believed that, that the Internet would be stopped in its tracks if it were over regulated and overtaxed. And there were tons of E commerce bills in there at the time. I was part of putting together the first White House summit under Clinton for online safety. So I've been working at tech policy ground zero in Washington since that time. I think when I look back at those early heady days, none of us would have expected that section 230 of the Communications Decency act wouldn't have been touched by now. Of course, social media wasn't even a consideration back then. You know, Mark Zuckerberg would have probably been more interested in Dungeons and Dragons as a teenager than building the world's first social networking platform.
- [14:22]
Stephen Overlea
Right. I mean, yeah, it's a very different world. And it's interesting the position you're in now being a regulator, looking at sort of the current state of the Internet and social media, what it has become. You know, here in the US lawmakers are looking at their own version of kids online safety legislation. It's not a social media ban, but would sort of impact how platforms are developed, the way they treat young users. I wonder what you think the US can maybe learn from Australia and your approach.
- [14:50]
Julie Inman Grant
Right. You know, well, I've had the pleasure over the past year or so to meet with Senator Blackburn and Senator Markey. The Attorney General has met with folks like Lindsey Graham. We're here. We just did a two day workshop with the Department of Homeland Security and 38 tech companies around Safety by Design to tackle child sexual abuse material. And it was an incredibly successful couple of workshops. So I've built a very different kind of regulator. We're agile, we're anticipatory. We do some cooperative initiatives with companies like Safety by Design to try and encourage them. Just as Congress back in the late 60s, early 70s, following Ralph Nader's Safe at Any Speed and all the data that they had around embedding seatbelts, preventing traffic fatalities, you know, they eventually had to legislate around the world to embed those car safety features. And at the time, the car manufacturers pushed back. But think about all the life saving technologies we take for granted that are in our cars from airbags, anti lock brakes, cars compete on their safety standards. And so what we're trying to say is this era of technological exceptionalism where tech companies are moving fast and breaking things. And we saw that with the AI companies in 2023. Maybe we need to just slow down a little bit and take that brilliant innovation, assess the risks, understand the harms and embed the safety protections upfront. So the analogy would be embed the virtual seat belts and erect the digital guardrails to prevent the next tech wreck from happening. They have the capability. They have. You know, we often say, where there's a will, there's a way. There's a way. We need to see a little bit more will. And sometimes it is that legislative push that will lead companies to do so.
- [16:55]
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- [17:26]
Stephen Overlea
You know, it's interesting because it seems always in tech there has been a disconnect between kind of the bright eyed idealists at tech companies who think they're building some cool new technology, and then how that technology winds up being abused or misused. Right. In some capacity. And I wonder how, as someone who's now a regulator has worked in tech, how do you kind of bridge that divide? Because there are some people who think tech companies are evil and I wonder if they're not sort of thinking about the full ways in which their creations can be used.
- [18:04]
Julie Inman Grant
Well, as again, somebody who worked in tech for 22 years, I don't know anyone who joined these companies to destroy people's lives through technology, although we see that happening. Most people join it because they feel passionate about technology for good. But there are a lot of drivers and maybe perverse incentives. Again, that first mover status that we saw with the Great AI Drag Race in around March, April 2023, you know, kind of shows that behavior. I was able to ask Eric Schmidt a question at a recent conference. I'm like, you know, are AI companies ever going to really embrace safety by design through every aspect of, of the development, deployment and design process? And I could see the cogs spinning in his head and he said, well, you know, we're doing things like safety cards. But the reality is if a company is trying to establish first mover status, unless he knows that everyone else is slowing down or putting in the friction to think about safety first, they're not going to do it. So again, this is where I think potentially regulation that requires this duty of care, which is a feature of cosa, which requires them to think about safer design. And I'd also say having been in product reviews and designs and even the kinds of reports we get from the public about how technology is being misused against them. Humans have ingenuity and a lot of creativity in terms of finding ways to misuse the technology. So even if, if you red team or you apply these safety by design frameworks, it doesn't mean you're going to stop all forms of weaponization. But that's why we say it's a continuous journey and a continuous process. And it's not just a one Stop, set and forget. We also know how product managers and engineers work. Unless they're rewarded for making a safer product, they won't do it. I had some great conversations with Arturo Bahar and Facebook whistleblower, the whistleblower. And he's a perfect example of someone who's a brilliant engineer but really, really passionate about making the platform safer. And he said one of the ways that I made the engineers kind of come to the safety party and lift their game is through a dashboard because no engineer wants to see on a sort of stoplight. They don't want to be the ones that are in the red. So that kind of competitive drive to lift and do better, you know, if we saw more CEOs, frankly saying we're going to really promote safety and safety by design as a top priority would make a difference. When I was at Microsoft, remember when Windows was seen as inherently riddled with security vulnerabilities and Bill Gates in 2001 kind of called a code red and said we're taking all of the engineers and developers off and we are going to recode every line of Windows code that happened. I mean, so many of these big companies have acquired other companies and their systems still aren't talking to each other.
- [21:18]
Stephen Overlea
Your online safety work cuts across a gamut of issues from child sexual abuse material to terrorism, content harassment and bullying. I'm curious how a couple of kind of emerging technologies impact that, one of which is AI. You've mentioned AI companies. I mean, to what degree do you think AI is going to be a challenge in your work going forward?
- [21:39]
Julie Inman Grant
Oh, I mean it's interesting. So one of my goals was to become an anticipatory regulator. We know that technology is always going to outpace policy and I didn't want it to hit me in the face. So I kind of built a future casting or horizon scanning team. It was a cross functional team to look at 18 to 24 months. So in 2020 we put out a Tech trends and challenges paper around deepfakes. I couldn't get anyone in the mainstream media to even pick it up because the idea was also to bring the populace along. These are the benefits, these are the risks, these how we plan to help on this. But what we were able to do because we saw the potential risks, we made sure that synthetic CSAM and synthetic TVEC and image based abuse or deep faked image based abuse were all covered by our schemes. So, so we've been seeing reports in all of our schemes of deep fakes. We've taken one man to Court using our remedial powers, who has been creating deep fakes of well known female politicians, but also sexual assault survivors. So by being able to think about what's coming, we're able to shape the future. And I'd also add things like immersive technologies. I was in a very senior meeting with senior executives around the future of the Metaverse, and one of the executives said, we haven't even figured out how to achieve interoperability or how to make money for this yet. Why are we worrying about safety and security? And there was a government official from the UAE who said, yes. And yeah, I agree. And I sort of felt like the lone wolf voice there. But I said, okay, you're building a city in a desert. Let's think about urban design principles. Cities are planned very deliberately for safety. We need to bring more of that mentality in terms of building new immersive worlds. Because when a sexual assault is happening in real time in a private space in the Metaverse, it's going to feel real to the person. We're talking about high sensory, hyperrealistic experiences. We're going to need something more akin to an escape hatch than we will the traditional reporting cues. So this is the kind of thinking we want and need to see. How do we make these really pleasant spaces and interesting spaces that people want to be in, but how do we make sure that they don't have horrific experiences in the meantime?
- [24:21]
Stephen Overlea
Right. You mentioned kind of feeling like a bit of a lone wolf in that meeting. Right. How do you get your counterparts in other countries or these tech companies to pay attention when new? I'm sure Australia is a beautiful, wonderful place. Right. You're also a small, relatively small country. These tech platforms are not based there. How do you get folks to kind of pay attention to this small and mighty kind of online safety regulator?
- [24:48]
Julie Inman Grant
Well, I have to say it was a very lonely experience those first seven years. There was no playbook, so we had to write it. As we went along, I made international engagement an important element of this work. The Internet's global. These companies, as you know, are domiciled overseas. And I wanted to make friends. So I really do think 2023 represented a tipping point. But I did see that Fiji, the UK and Ireland were going to form online safety regulators. So I reached out to them and said, what if we build a global online safety regulators network? We can start small, but we can work together to counter the wealth, the stealth and the might of the industry. We now have nine regulators and 18 observers. But what we're Trying to achieve is a greater degree of regulatory coherence. Even if, and we're going to grow this further through the Digital Services act in Europe, I met with 27 different digital services coordinators in each of the member states. But just with the nine members we have in the online safety network today, it's the same size collectively as the United States. So there will be collective power. We know that jurisdictional arbitrage is going to be a tactic used by some companies that do not want to be regulated. But for the most part, I'm working with most of the major tech platforms and you know, there's a delicate dance there, but other than a couple of companies, we haven't had an issue of compliance to date.
- [26:35]
Stephen Overlea
Got it. Do you think the US needs an online safety regulator?
- [26:38]
Julie Inman Grant
I would be absolutely delighted if the US had an online safety regulator and one that really was focused on harms remediation. I've of course been following the debate over the years around online safety in the United States and it's really been about suppressing conservative voices versus progressive voices. It's been politicized in a very different way. Online safety is very bipartisan in Australia because I think the kind of collective value is this is an extractive industry. It's taking revenue out, it's taking our citizens data out. So we want to protect our citizenry and we expect that these companies that are providing services here and ostensibly causing some harm are showing responsibility and are also respecting our laws. If we had a fellow regulator to work with in the United States, I mean, I think it would be game changing.
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Stephen Overlea
One last question for you, and that's just because I don't think I heard it earlier. But how did you actually wind up in Australia? What took you there?
- [27:44]
Julie Inman Grant
Well, I'd been with Microsoft for five years here in Washington D.C. during the midst of the antitrust trial and CDA and everything else. It was a very tough five years. I was 32 and single. We used to say then it was great because, you know, at Microsoft it was 70% men to 30% women. The odds were good, but the goods were odd. The odds are still still the same today. But instead I decided send me somewhere Microsoft. So they sent me about as far away as they could to a formal penal colony. And what did I do? I ended up falling in love and marrying an Australian accountant.
- [28:23]
Stephen Overlea
Well, Commissioner, thank you for being here on Politico Tech.
- [28:26]
Julie Inman Grant
Thank you for having me.
- [28:30]
Stephen Overlea
That's all for today's Politico Tech. If you enjoy Politico Tech, be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. And for more tech news, subscribe to our newsletters, Digital Future Daily and Morning Tech. Music in our show comes from the mysterious Brakemaster Cylinder. Our managing producer is Annie Reese. Our producer is Afraid Abdullah. And our editors are Steve Heuser, Daniel Ocheslo and Louisa Savage. I'm Stephen Overlay. See you back here on Monday.