The War on Porn Regular Updates about the Assault on The Adult Industry
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Some policies don’t land with a thud so much as a slow, unsettling echo — the kind that makes you sit up a little straighter and wonder what pushed things this far. That’s how it felt when Australia’s eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, announced that search engines across the country will soon be required to blur pornographic and violent images. The rule kicks in on December 27, and you can almost sense the mix of urgency and inevitability behind it.
“We know that a high proportion of this accidental exposure happens through search engines as the primary gateway to harmful content, and once a child sees a sexually violent video, for instance, maybe of a man aggressively choking a woman during sex, they can’t cognitively process, let alone unsee that content,” Grant said.
There’s something chilling about that last part — the idea of “can’t unsee.” It’s true for adults, too, but with kids it lands differently. Grant continued: “From 27 December, search engines have an obligation to blur image results of online pornography and extreme violence to protect children from this incidental exposure, much the same way safe search mode already operates on services like Google and Bing when enabled.”
Blurred results aren’t new. They’ve been tucked inside safe search settings for years, hidden like a fire extinguisher behind a glass panel — available, but only if someone remembers to activate it. What’s shifting now is the weight of responsibility: it’s no longer on parents to flip a switch; the platforms have to build the guardrails themselves. And all of this is happening alongside another major change hitting Australia on December 10, when the country’s social media ban for under-16s comes into force.
Earlier this month, it was estimated that around 150,000 Facebook accounts and 350,000 Instagram accounts belonging to under-16s will disappear from the digital landscape, like entire classrooms quietly going offline. Grant framed the larger moment this way: “These are important societal innovations that will provide greater protections for all Australians, not just children, who don‘t wish to see ‘lawful but awful’ content.”
That phrase — “lawful but awful” — hangs in the air. It’s complicated, a little subjective, and strangely honest. And maybe that’s the real story here: a country trying to redraw the line between what the internet allows and what people can realistically live with.
