X has told the Australian Senate committee that a proposal expanding the powers of the nation’s top censor would let the regulator demand documents from people outside of Australia. The only connection that would be required for X to have to hand over documents to Australia’s eSafety Commissioner is that the person is “affiliated” with a platform.
The submission, published Tuesday, targets the Online Safety Amendment (Strengthening Enforcement for the Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2026. The bill cleared the House of Representatives on July 1 and hit the Senate Environment and Communications Legislation Committee on the same day. That committee will report on August 25.
The changes would “compel any person outside Australia…to provide information and documents merely because they are ‘affiliated’ with a company,” X said in a filing.
X described that as being “in clear conflict” with international legal principles, warning that the amendment “raises potential for a severe impact on international comity.”
X said the plans gave no “due regard to procedural fairness, privacy, the broader impacts on online services, and Australia’s digital economy.”
A company that fails to take “reasonable” steps to keep under-16s off its platform currently faces a penalty of up to A$49.5 million or 30,000 penalty units. The bill doubles that to A$99 million, around US$69 million, for systematic breaches.
Under the bill, eSafety could also compel the records from the third-party digital ID vendors that platforms hire, as well as from app store operators.
Those vendors hold face scans, ID document images, and inference data drawn from Australians who handed over sensitive data in order to stay on the platform after Australia banned social media for under 16s.
The bill would give the government regulator a legal route into all of that data that it recently mandated to be collected.
eSafety complained to the panel that its current authority to compel documents lags behind that of other regulators and that it’s left to depend on “representations from providers about their own compliance.”
Without power over third-party age assurance providers, the regulator said investigations face “significant” barriers. eSafety is preparing a possible enforcement lawsuit against five platforms and says its limited powers are slowing that work.
A US congressional committee has already asked Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant to testify, accusing her of imperiling American free speech. Elon Musk called the ban a “backdoor way to control access to the internet by all Australians” in an earlier post.
DIGI, one of the industry groups representing several online platforms, told the inquiry that the eSafety commissioner already holds enforcement powers that have not yet been put to use, the implication being that they should use those powers before demanding more.
