Jack Goldsmith is a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University’s (ANU) School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet), Associate Fellow at the Social Cyber Institute, and Editor-in-Chief at Young Australians in International Affairs. Prior to these roles, Jack worked at the Jeff Bleich Centre for Democracy and Disruptive Technologies, where he researched the social and strategic applications of machine learning and big data. Jack’s research interests centre on the international political economy of technology and security, including how geopolitics intersects with regulation. Jack holds a Bachelor of International Studies (Honours) from the University of Queensland and a Master of Laws from the ANU.

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To what extent and how the state is permitted to regulate online content perceived as harmful remains a persistent problem for democracies. Who decides what is harmful, and for whom? The Australian eSafety Commissioner (eSafety) occupies a unique position in this regard as the world’s first authority tasked with regulating cyberbullying, image-based abuse, and illegal and harmful online content to support Australians’ online safety. To date, eSafety has remained thoroughly understudied in the content moderation and platform governance literatures, though much scholarly work has explored similar efforts in the EU and US. This article seeks to contribute to this discourse by examining eSafety through the lens of regulatory politics to unearth the key underlying generative dynamics of its regulatory apparatus and help make sense of its outcomes. Drawing upon international relations, regulatory, and Australian political and legal theory, this article seeks to unravel the genesis and evolution of eSafety across two dimensions. First, it charts the regulatory politics preceding and following the body’s establishment, situating it within Australia’s legacy censorship regime and exploring its surrounding norms and political debates. Second, the article links this genealogy with the framework of responsive regulation, mapping the mechanisms through which eSafety exercises its mandate, including educational strategies, voluntary codes, and enforcement mechanisms. It concludes by arguing that Australia’s eSafety is not a product of, nor is it informed by, any defined ideological or doctrinal commitment to traditional democratic norms. eSafety is instead grounded in Australia’s tradition of political pragmatism and is animated by, in its approach to online user safety, an historic syncretization of national security with moral impropriety. This normative basis informs eSafety’s responsive regulatory framework, which enables a flexible, innovative agenda from which to pioneer platform governance initiatives with limited public constraints. This article offers one of the first academic inquiries into the role of eSafety and offers a point of comparison for the further study of global platform governance regimes within and across democratic contexts.