Porn crackdown amid fears Australia facing ‘harmful sexual socialisation of entire generation’

Australia faces a ‘harmful sexual socialisation of an entire generation’ if unfettered access by children to pornography is not reversed with tech companies given six months to act or face forced regulation.

eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant has launched a crackdown to protect Australian children from online pornography. Picture: Martin Ollman / NewsWire

Australia is facing a “harmful sexual socialisation of an entire generation” if unfettered access to online pornography by children is not urgently reversed, with the Albanese government giving tech companies a six-month deadline to act or face forced regulation.

The eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, has warned of underage kids setting-up OnlyFans accounts monetising sexual acts, replicating extreme choking and asphyxiation themes glorified in porn content and viewing “unsolicited dick pics and nudes” via messaging and gaming apps.

The call for action follows a spike in the exposure of young Australians to pornographic material on platforms including TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat, which “violates their terms of service”.

With Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton warning of the need for stricter age-verification rules amid concerns about the social perils of porn, tech companies have been set an October deadline to present preliminary codes.

The new enforceable codes, which primarily focus on pornography, also capture other high-impact material including themes of suicide and serious illness such as self-harm and eating disorders.

Measures floated by the eSafety Commissioner include “opt-out” default settings on new devices that automatically include safety and parental controls, deployment of age assurance technologies, blurring or filtering unwanted sexual content and applying multi-layered protections.

Ms Inman Grant on Monday sent notices to five industry groups representing app stores, apps, porn sites, search engines, social media and instant messaging platforms; internet service providers; multi-player gaming developers; online dating services; and equipment providers.

If the groups, representing a range of companies including Apple, Microsoft, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, telcos, porn sites and ISPs, fail to provide meaningful protections for children, the eSafety Commissioner will impose government-enforced rules.

Concerned about violent and extreme pornography that children are accessing inadvertently or directly, Ms Inman Grant said “we’re really talking about the harmful sexual socialisation of an entire generation if we don’t get ahead of this”.

“This is not the Penthouse that your dad hid in the sock drawer. It is now available without any real impediments and we know it’s easy for kids to get around blocks,” Ms Inman Grant told The Australian.

“Parents need to be active participants in their children’s online lives but we can’t leave it all to the parents … we need to expect more from all of these technology providers.

“We’re not leaving this to chance; we are saying this is what we believe you can do in all of these sectors just to give them some clear expectations. I think it will be challenging for them to achieve consensus and that’s why we’re also reserving the right to move to standards much more quickly if we don’t get a solid draft by October.”

The deadline for tech companies, which have squabbled over responsibility for age verification, builds on the eSafety Commissioner’s Age Verification Roadmap commissioned by the Coalition in 2021. Ms Inman Grant said the codes would cover eight different sectors of the technology ecosystem, ensuring companies could not “point fingers at other parts of the industry”.

“These are the richest companies in the world, with the brightest minds and access to the most advanced technologies. We need them focusing on doing this in ways that safeguard children but allow adults to access content that they are legally allowed to.

“The last thing anyone wants is children seeing violent or extreme pornography without guidance, context or the appropriate maturity levels because they may think that a video showing a man aggressively choking a woman during sex on a porn site is what consent, sex and healthy relationships should look like.”

Research shows that “while the average age when Australian children first encounter pornography is around 13, a third of these children are actually seeing this content younger and often by accident”. Some 60 per cent of younger Australians are being exposed to pornography on social media platforms including TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat.