When Australian parents walk into a toy store stocking all the big-name brands, they rightfully assume everything available will have been designed and tested for a range of child safety risks well before it’s placed on display.
No one frets these shiny products might lead down a dark rabbit hole of grooming and violent extremism that one day causes their child to commit an atrocity or be sexually abused.
It stands to reason we should expect no less from digital spaces where our children play, learn and connect every day.
The scenario I describe may sound extreme – a helicopter parent’s worst nightmare – but eSafety’s latest transparency report into online gaming demonstrates major online platforms have a fair way to go to level up on safety.
The report examined safety measures of the providers behind Roblox, Fortnite, Minecraft and Steam, focusing on what they were doing to prevent serious online harms including child sexual exploitation, grooming, and exposure to violent material and activity.
Most concerning is the stark difference in how providers consider risk, including their inconsistent approaches to preventing high-risk games being accessible on their services. These include reports of bathroom simulator games where players have been known to simulate sexual activity with children and games which recreate real-world mass shootings or incorporate terrorist propaganda.
While some providers have recently introduced safety uplifts since receiving our regulatory notices, our report shows their approach to safety is too often an afterthought.
For the best part of a decade, I have championed Safety by Design – where risks and harms are assessed upfront and safety measures are baked in, rather than bolted on after the harms have occurred – and this report shows why.
It’s an initiative that is gathering pace across governments and industry globally, and nowhere more so than right here in Australia.
Safety by Design serves as the primary scaffolding for digital duty of care, a reform the Australian Government has committed to introducing into the Online Safety Act to make designing for safety a proactive and mandatory obligation.
But any changes to the Act Parliament may pass won’t be starting from scratch. They will build on the strong foundational supports we have laid over the past decade via our holistic approach to protecting Australians online, including the transparency powers that enabled us to produce this report, and our mandatory industry codes and standards.
Under these codes we have recently secured court-enforceable undertakings from Roblox to do more to protect Australian kids from grooming, sexual exploitation and abuse.
We have also commenced civil penalty proceedings in the Federal Court against the provider of the Telegram messaging service for its alleged failure to detect and remove pro-terror material from the platform, including videos of terrorist executions and mass shootings.
These regulatory tools are specifically designed to reach online services like interactive gaming and messaging that fall outside of Australia’s social media age restrictions.
In applying them, eSafety is further protecting young people from harmful content and conduct on the range of platforms we know they are using.
Whilst grooming and sexual exploitation have been longer-term concerns, efforts to traumatise, manipulate or radicalise vulnerable people, especially young people, have become more prevalent recently.
This is one reason we acted swiftly in April 2024 following the Wakeley stabbing attack in Sydney, designated a terrorist incident by the NSW Police Commissioner, and after the Bondi attack last year.
In testing the concept of “removal” in the Federal Court, we eventually accepted X geo-blocking footage of the Wakeley stabbing, thereby preventing young Australians from easily accessing this radicalising content but leaving it accessible in other jurisdictions.
A tragic post-script is the role it played in the murder of three children at Southport in the UK just a few months later in July, 2024 The Southport Public Inquiry later found one of the last things perpetrator Axel Rudakubana did, six minutes before leaving his house to stab three little girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance party, was search for and apparently view the Wakely stabbing footage on X.
This whole episode underlined one of the key challenges sovereign governments everywhere face in seeking greater protections for their citizens online: laws are local or national but the internet is global. And there will continue to be huge asymmetries between the wealth and power of Big Tech companies and small regulators from middle powers like Australia.
It is also a grim reminder of the horrific real-world consequences of online harms. Harms that can be inculcated silently in our children more quickly and decisively than we might think, including on the “fun and engaging” gaming platforms our children use every day.
Shining a light on how companies are tackling a range of harms as we’ve tried to do in this report is a critical part of this important work. Meaningful transparency around the safety features and functionality on a range of online platforms is very difficult to come by. But the impacts can be powerful.
As Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, it is my job to help make online spaces safer for all Australians – especially children – using whatever powers our Parliament chooses to bestow. This is at the heart of everything we do at eSafety and what the Australian public has come to rely on and trust us for.
