Swimming Between the Digital Flags: Helping Young Australians Navigate Social Media's Dangerous Currents

In a National Press Club address in Canberra, Australia's eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant argued that today's online environment is far more powerful and harder to navigate than when she last addressed the club in 2018. She described eSafety's own concern, first raised in a February 2025 advisory, that children as young as 10 were spending hours a day in conversation with sexualised AI companion chatbots, with some reportedly directed toward explicit sexual acts, and said deepfake image-based abuse using 'nudifying' apps had become a recurring problem in Australian schools. She used a water-safety analogy — flagged beaches, lifeguards, swimming lessons — to argue that social media's minimum-age law, algorithmic design features such as streaks and endless scroll, and digital-literacy education should work together, rather than relying on any single fix, to reduce children's exposure to compulsive design and harmful content.

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