Julie Inman Grant
Government & Regulators · eSafety Commissioner (Australia)
Australia's eSafety Commissioner, charged with enforcing the world's first nationwide under-16 social media law.
Julie Inman Grant serves as Australia's eSafety Commissioner, the regulator responsible for enforcing the country's under-16 social media law, which took effect in December 2025 as the first ban of its kind anywhere in the world. Her office sits at the operational end of a policy debate other countries are still having in theory: how an age limit written into law actually gets applied to real platforms and real accounts. Her work is a live case study for the government lane of this library — regulation moving from advisory language into enforcement, and the practical questions that raises for platforms, families, and kids.
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WORKS IN THE LIBRARY (10)
VIDEOS
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.
Excerpts From a Conversation with Julie Inman Grant, Australia's eSafety Commissioner
The Council on Foreign Relations published edited excerpts of a discussion between Julie Inman Grant and CFR Senior Fellow Linda Robinson on Australia's Online Safety Act and global online-safety efforts. Grant traced eSafety's founding in 2015, after the death by suicide of an Australian celebrity following sustained online trolling, and described its cyberbullying complaints scheme, which she said resolves about 90% of reported cases by getting harmful content removed. She detailed the office's image-based-abuse scheme, noting it disproportionately affects girls and young women, and flagged a sharp rise in financial sextortion targeting young men aged 18 to 24. Grant framed these complaint-and-remediation schemes as tools for correcting a structural power imbalance between large platforms and individual users, paired with prevention, education, and international regulatory partnerships. TechKids Foundation includes this as a detailed, on-record account of the operational schemes behind Australia's youth online-safety framework.
A Fairer Fight: Protecting Childhood and Adolescence in a Digital World
In a speech delivered virtually to the Global Age Assurance Summit in Amsterdam, Julie Inman Grant argued that privacy-preserving age-assurance technology has matured enough to make meaningful age limits on children's platform access practical, after nearly two decades of her own work on the issue. She said social media was not built with children's safety as a goal, and described a 'darker side' including algorithmic manipulation, endless-scroll design, exposure to violent pornography and extremist content, and — while cautioning research is still evolving — content related to disordered eating and suicidal ideation. She argued unregulated, engagement-optimized platform use may interfere with healthy development when it displaces sleep, physical activity, or offline interaction, and outlined eSafety's 'three Ps' framework. TechKids Foundation includes this speech as Grant's statement of the reasoning behind global age-assurance efforts.
TESTIMONY
Helping Aussie Kids Swim Between the Flags Online
This is eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant's edited opening statement to Australia's Joint Select Committee on Social Media and Australian Society, delivered as the committee opened its inquiry into social media's effects on the community. Grant argued for a layered approach — age verification, education, and platform accountability — rather than a single fix, using a water-safety analogy of flagged beaches and swimming lessons. She cited eSafety research finding that almost two-thirds of 14-to-17-year-olds had viewed extremely harmful content in the past year, including material related to drug abuse, suicide, or self-harm, plus violent content, and that more than a quarter saw content promoting unhealthy eating habits. She also noted that maturity and resilience, not age alone, shape how young people experience social media. TechKids Foundation includes this statement as Grant's own framing of the evidence behind Australia's subsequent social media age law.
eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant: Senate Estimates Opening Statement (February 2026)
Speaking to a Senate Estimates hearing on Safer Internet Day, Julie Inman Grant updated senators on enforcement of Australia's under-16 social media law roughly two months after it took effect. She said a transparency report the week before had found eight major platforms still failing to prevent weaponisation of their services for child sexual exploitation and sextortion, noted a preliminary EU finding that TikTok had failed to mitigate risks from its own addictive design, and criticized YouTube's move to loosen limits on monetizing content related to self-harm and suicidal ideation. She credited engagement with Apple with removing, or issuing warnings on, more than 100 'chat roulette'-style apps pairing adults with children. TechKids Foundation includes this statement as Grant's most recent on-record account of platform-accountability work tied to the law her office enforces.
STUDIES
How Will Australia's Under-16 Social Media Ban Work? We Asked the Law's Enforcer
NPR technology correspondent Bobby Allyn interviewed Julie Inman Grant shortly after Australia's parliament passed a law barring under-16s from social media, asking how the eSafety Commissioner's office would enforce it. Grant explained her agency's origins as a children's online-safety regulator, its cyberbullying takedown scheme, and its image-based-abuse complaints process, and described three imperfect ways to verify a user's age online — ID documents, behavioral signals, and biometrics — each with its own privacy trade-off. Pressed on mixed research linking social media and teen mental health, she acknowledged the link is not clearly causal but 'certainly correlational,' and said the law targets addictive design features and dark patterns rather than social media use itself. TechKids Foundation includes this interview as a plain-language, on-record account of the enforcement thinking behind the law.
Julie Inman Grant: The Woman Tasked with Kicking Australian Kids Off Social Media
BBC Australia correspondent Katy Watson profiles Julie Inman Grant two months into enforcement of the country's under-16 social media ban, describing the volume of threats her office receives and the personal toll of a role that has made her a target for critics ranging from tech companies to members of the US Congress. Inman Grant defends the ban using a water-safety analogy — teaching children to swim rather than fencing off the ocean entirely — and says delaying access by a few years, paired with digital-literacy education, is worth attempting, even though critics say the policy is unevenly enforceable and may disadvantage rural, disabled, or LGBTQI+ teens who rely on online communities. She also describes her own household, including 13-year-old twins, as a live test case. TechKids Foundation includes this profile for its on-record account of the case for and against the ban from the regulator enforcing it.
The Woman Who Got YouTube Banned for Teens in Australia
TIME editor-at-large Belinda Luscombe profiles Julie Inman Grant around her decision to recommend that YouTube — originally carved out of Australia's under-16 social media law for its educational value — be brought under the ban after all. The piece traces Grant's path from tech-industry policy roles into government regulation, and quotes her comparing platform obligations to vehicle safety standards. It notes her office subsequently asked 16 more platforms, from Roblox to WhatsApp, to self-assess against the same rules, and situates her work in an unresolved debate — the article states plainly that some studies have 'plausibly linked' rising teen depression and anxiety to social media's spread, while other researchers say more research is needed. TechKids Foundation includes this piece as an account of how one regulator's scope decisions reshape a landmark youth-safety law.
AI Chatbots and Companions – Risks to Children and Young People
This is the first entry in eSafety's Online Safety Advisory series, issued under Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, warning that AI companion apps — chatbots designed to simulate friendship, emotional support, or romantic relationships — pose particular risks to children and young people. The advisory says some children are spending hours daily in unmoderated conversations that can drift into sex, drug use, self-harm, suicide, and eating disorders, and that high-frequency, problematic use of poorly safety-designed companion apps has been associated with self-harm, citing the death by suicide of a 14-year-old boy in the United States as a documented example rather than a claim of direct causation. It also flags 'addictive'-feeling design patterns that may encourage dependency and social withdrawal, and unhealthy relationship modeling for still-developing users. TechKids Foundation includes this advisory as an official regulator's own association-language framing of AI-companion risk to minors, issued to guide parents, carers, and educators.
Doxing, Death Threats and the Ire of Elon Musk: Who Is the Australian Woman Taking on the Social Media Giants?
Published the day before Australia's under-16 social media ban took effect, this Guardian profile by Daisy Dumas traces Julie Inman Grant's path from Microsoft and Twitter policy roles into government regulation, and the personal cost of her fight with major platforms, including a documented conflict with Elon Musk and a declined request to testify before a US congressional inquiry into her office's conduct. It reports eSafety research finding seven in ten children aged 10 to 15 had encountered content associated with harm online in the prior year, three-quarters of them most recently on a social media platform — content the piece specifies included misogyny, violence, disordered eating, and suicide. Inman Grant describes the ban as introducing 'friction' into a system with previously close to none. TechKids Foundation includes this profile for its reporting on both the regulatory stakes and political pressure surrounding Grant's advocacy.