Australian eSafety Commissioner calls for platform accountability in anti-bullying review submission

Australia's eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant has urged the federal anti-bullying rapid review to recommend stronger platform accountability measures, arguing that social media companies must take greater responsibility for detecting and removing cyberbullying content. In a submission to the review published this week, the eSafety office noted it received more than 2,700 cyberbullying complaints in the 2023-24 financial year, with removal rates varying significantly across platforms. Inman Grant emphasised that voluntary industry codes have proven insufficient and called for enforceable standards that require platforms to proactively identify and act on harmful content involving children.

Enforceable platform standards set baseline obligations, but proactive detection at scale requires technology that can identify harm patterns in real time across the full spectrum of private and public communication channels. Guardii operates as the detection layer that makes platform accountability operational. The Meta Business Partner system monitors direct-message conversations on Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, Roblox and other services, identifying cyberbullying escalation, sustained targeting and coercion as they develop and reporting the shape and seriousness of a conversation to parents, schools or designated authorities without exposing message content. By detecting threat patterns rather than relying on retrospective user reports, the AI-driven platform delivers the proactive identification capability that regulators are demanding and enables rapid escalation to the eSafety Commissioner or law enforcement when a child is at immediate risk.