Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Goes to Davos!

Senator ROBERTS: Thank you for being here today. Did you attend the World Economic Forum planning session in Davos last month? If so, was that in your personal capacity or as the eSafety Commissioner?

Ms Inman Grant: I attended the world economic global summit as the eSafety Commissioner. I achieved more in four days than I could in four years because I was meeting with senior technology executives. I was talking directly to the people who are building AI and immersive technologies and asked directly the decision makers what they are doing to make their platforms safer. I was sharing really our leadership and our model in terms of how we’re tackling online safety.

Senator ROBERTS: Well, I think we’re the ones who should be assessing whether or not you’re justified. How many staff accompanied you? What was the cost to taxpayers?

Ms Inman Grant: I will take that on notice. I had one staff member accompany me. I supplemented that with trips to Brussels, where I met with European Commission officials, and to Dublin to meet with my fellow regulators in Ireland and the UK. So it was a very productive trip.

Senator ROBERTS: Now can I have the justification, please? What did taxpayers get for their money? How did attending help in the discharge of your duties?

Ms Inman Grant: Well, I had access to the presidents of most of the major technology companies, including the CEO of OpenAI. I was able to ask him what they were planning to do to build safety into this. Any time that we can influence the decision-makers at this level to make technology safer is better.

Senator ROBERTS: You run an online agency, right?

Ms Inman Grant: I run—

Senator ROBERTS: Couldn’t you have done this online?

Ms Inman Grant: I run a real agency that has real people and capital equipment. I couldn’t engage in this forum online and not have those kinds of meetings to make a real difference for Australians in terms of getting real change happening.

Senator ROBERTS: You are referencing your panel session at Davos. Your office has just sent Twitter a notice regarding them allowing hate on the Twitter platform, including allowing previously suspended users back on the platform.

Ms Inman Grant: Yes.

Senator ROBERTS: Can you give me examples of Australian accounts that X has allowed back on that your office objects to?

Ms Inman Grant: Well, the online hate notice looked at the range of trust and safety governance steps that they had taken, including firing 80 per cent of their safety engineers, more than half of their content moderators and 80 per cent of their public policy personnel—so the people who actually look after the safety. We did ask them. It was reported that there were 62,000 previously banned users. To be permanently banned on Twitter, you have to have violated the policies pretty egregiously a number of times. We asked them the question. They responded. We asked about the 62,000. They responded with 6,100. We assumed that meant they reinstated 6,100 previously banned Australian accounts, which wasn’t in the manner and form of the notice and the question that we asked them. They didn’t name what those specific ones were, but they did tell us that there are no additional safety provisions even though they have been permanently banned for online hate in some cases.

Senator ROBERTS: It seems to me, Ms Grant, that you’re assuming the previous bans were in order. Had you explored those previous bans before coming to that judgement?

Ms Inman Grant: Twitter, as the company, had a whole range of policies, including a hateful conduct policy. They remove or—

Senator ROBERTS: So you haven’t? What you’ve done is you’ve gone off their interpretation of their policy, even though we know they were biased.

Ms Inman Grant: That’s the only thing we can do, Senator.

Senator ROBERTS: Could you come back to my question—

CHAIR: Senator Roberts, please allow Ms Inman Grant to answer.

Senator ROBERTS: and give me examples of Australian accounts?

CHAIR: Senator Roberts, I appreciate that you are somewhat agitated. Could you please respect the witnesses and allow them to answer the questions.

Senator ROBERTS: I would like the witness to give me examples of Australian accounts that X has allowed back that her office objects to. That’s my question and you haven’t answered it.

Ms Inman Grant: I didn’t ask them specific questions about which accounts they were. I asked for the quant the numbers.

Senator ROBERTS: Thank you. Are you setting yourself up as an arbiter of what should and should not be seen online?

Ms Inman Grant: No. I am not. I have been designated by the government to serve as the eSafety Commissioner and to remediate harms of online individuals who have experienced online abuse and, in most cases, have reported that abuse to the platform. The platform hasn’t enforced their terms of policy, so we are there as a safety net or a backstop to help remediate that harm.

Senator ROBERTS: Thank you. Your remarks included this comment, and I quote: There are lots of different tools in the toolbox we’ll be using. What are those tools? Under what explicit power do you possess them? Who supervises how you use them?

Ms Inman Grant: All our powers are designated under the Online Safety Act. We have a range of complaints schemes that deal with youth based cyber bullying, image-based abuse, adult cyber abuse and the online content scheme. We have systems and process powers under the basic online safety expectations. We have now six codes registered and two standards that we’re working on. They are the primary tools.

Senator ROBERTS: Thank you. Who supervises how you use them? Who assesses whether or not you’re being effective or overextending?

Ms Inman Grant: Well, we are held to account. We have lots of reporting and transparency and accountability measures ourselves. If there’s ever a question about any decision that is made, it can be challenged through internal review, the ombudsman, the AAT or the Federal Court. So we are accountable to the people and the government.

Senator ROBERTS: Thank you. At the World Economic Forum planning session in Davos, you said, and I quote: We have started something called the Global Online Safety Regulator.  Who is ‘we’? Did you receive ministerial permission to involve Australia in another globalist power sink hole?  You may laugh, but we are facing a big threat.

Ms Inman Grant: I am an independent statutory authority. The Internet is global. Most of our regulatory targets are based overseas. For more than seven years, we were the only online safety regulator in the world.  Now, we use the tools we have and we can be effective, but we know we’re going to go much further when we work together with other like-minded independent statutory authorities around the globe. So with the UK, with Ireland and with Fiji in November 2022, we launched the global online safety regulators network. That has now grown to seven independent regulators, including France, South Korea and South Africa. A number of countries are serving as observers. That is so we can achieve a degree of regulatory coherence for the technology industry and make sure that we’re working together to achieve better safety outcomes for all of our citizens.

Senator ROBERTS: Did you get ministerial approval for that?

Ms Inman Grant: I don’t think it was required. Certainly the minister was aware.

Senator ROBERTS: Thank you. This is a further remark you made—this is how it was reported:

We have reached a tipping point where technology is neither good nor bad. We need to be pushing towards the forces of good.  That comment seems steeped in hubris. Who decides what the forces of good are? You?

Ms Inman Grant: Well, the Online Safety Act does define thresholds for harm. Certainly our research looks at the benefits and the drawbacks in terms of how people experience technology and whether it helps them to create, to connect, to work and to communicate versus the harms that they experience, whether it’s—

Senator ROBERTS: How do you listen to people?

Ms Inman Grant: How do I listen to people?

Senator ROBERTS: You just said it’s the people who decide.

Ms Inman Grant: I listen to people in many different ways. We have citizen facing complaints schemes. We’re out in forums all the time. We correspond. We also have about two million people who visit our website every year so they can access resources or report forms of online abuse.

Senator ROBERTS: This is my last question, Chair. Thank you for that. You state: Deepfakes are covered under our world leading image-based abuse scheme, which has close to a 90 per cent success rate. How do you measure 90 per cent objectively? This is your statement.

Ms Inman Grant: We look at the number of complaints that we receive. The 90 per cent success rate is because in the vast majority of cases people just want the intimate imagery and videos taken down, mostly through informal means. We measure the 90 per cent based on how many complaints we receive and how many we get down.

Senator ROBERTS: So the images reported and the images removed? Ninety per cent of them would be removed?

Mr Dagg: When we investigate a complaint about image-based abuse, for example, or any of the other harms set out in our complaint schemes, we measure the response to our requests for removal or our formal interventions. We find, as the commissioner said, requests to be far more efficient and produce a faster turnaround, so they constitute the bulk of our interventions. Ninety per cent of those in the case of image-based abuse succeed. That measure of success is whether or not the images are taken down.

Senator ROBERTS: Thank you.