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Australia has a right to apply safety rules to social

media,

Inman Grant says

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Inman Grant asked to testify by US congressional committee

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Global interest in Australia's social media age

restrictions

grows

By Byron Kaye

SYDNEY, Dec 10 (Reuters) - The regulator overseeing

Australia's world-first teenage social media ban rejected the

"technological exceptionalism" championed by mostly U.S.-based

platforms and said a groundswell of American parents wanted

similar measures.

eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said Australia was

entitled to restrict access to social media, just as it applied

safety rules to any imported good, and added that many American

parents had decried a lack of equivalent guardrails there.

The comments show the regulator framing the Australian law

as a step toward a common goal and shrugging off complaints by

some of the world's biggest tech firms and senior U.S. lawmakers

who have called the Australian law, with its corporate fines of

up to A$49.5 million ($33 million), a threat to free speech.

Ahead of Australia's law requiring social media platforms to

block people under 16 taking effect on Wednesday, a U.S.

congressional committee said it wants Inman Grant to testify,

describing her as a foreign official challenging the First

Amendment.

"I hear from the parents and the activists and everyday

people in America, 'we wish we had an e-safety commissioner like

you in America, we wish we had a government that was going to

put tween and teen safety before technology profits," Inman

Grant said in an interview at her office in Sydney.

"There's more that unites us than divides us," added Inman

Grant, who is American-born and worked in policy roles at

Microsoft and Twitter before becoming Australia's first internet

regulator in 2017.

Already governments from Europe to Asia have said they plan

similar steps to Australia amid rising concern about social

media's links to bullying, body image problems and

radicalisation, all fuelled by what Inman Grant called a "system

to keep stickiness through outragement".

But the U.S. has bristled at attempted restrictions, with

attempts by some states to impose an age minimum stalled by

legal challenges. U.S. federal legislation which contains safety

requirements for minors but no age minimum is yet to become law

after three years.

That did not mean the U.S. would never follow Australia's

lead regarding online safety, said Inman Grant, adding that she

had worked in the past year with the Department of Homeland

Security to help build tools to stop the spread of child sexual

abuse material.

The Take It Down Act, a U.S. law banning artificial

intelligence-generated deepfakes, which was signed into law by

President Donald Trump in May, "very much emulates what we've

been doing here for eight years", Inman Grant said.

Regardless, she said, countries were entitled to impose

safety standards on imported goods, from cars to medicine, and

it was "technological exceptionalism" for platforms to say the

same shouldn't apply to them.

"There is no other consumer-facing industry in the world

where we don't expect them to make sure that there are safety

standards," she said.

"This is Australia calling time on social media and the

deceptive and harmful design features tethering our children to

their platforms."

All 10 platforms covered by the ban - including Meta's

Instagram, TikTok, Snap's Snapchat and

Alphabet's YouTube - have said they will comply, but

Inman Grant acknowledged the challenge enforcing the law if the

platforms ultimately violate it.

That may not matter.

"In my experience...sometimes it isn't the regulation itself

that is the impetus for doing the right thing," she said.

"It's often the reputational damage."