In Julie Inman Grant’s address to Australia’s National Press Club in June, her opening words – an off-the-cuff response to the club’s social media presence on X – were among her most telling. With her ability to perform on a podium, her poise and shining smartwatch, she told the audience as she took to the mic: “As you can imagine, my biggest fanbase is on X.”

Under the joshing was the truth: the platform’s owner, Elon Musk, has made life hard for Australia’s eSafety commissioner over the past 18 months or so. But while she might not have his power or his budget or his global megaphone, she does have an audacious goal – and it’s a goal Musk has inadvertently helped spotlight.

“While the tech industry moves backwards, we must move forwards,” the US-born Australian citizen told the audience.

“We are seeking to create some friction [in the] system to protect children where previously there has been close to none … We are treating big tech like the extractive industry it has become.”

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Australia’s under-16s social media ban is the first of its kind and, as Inman Grant said, “the stakes are high – we know the world’s eyes are upon us”. From 10 December, it will prevent under-16s from accessing Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat, Reddit, Kick, Twitch and X – although how it will look, even at this late stage, is still not entirely clear.

To the commissioner, there is no “fair fight” between children and social media algorithms and the statistics paint a grim picture: eSafety research found seven in 10 children aged 10 to 15 had encountered content associated with harm online. Three-quarters of those had most recently encountered that content – including misogyny, violence, disordered eating and suicide – on a social media platform.

It might also be said there is no fair fight between her own stand versus the tech megaliths. Their influence is so creeping, their entanglement in daily life so deep, that there seems to be no equivalent recent precedent. Seatbelts in cars, electricity safety switches, even curbing the massive machine of big tobacco – none seems to capture the same opaquely monetised might of social media.

In this fight Inman Grant has succeeded in creating friction. So much, in fact, that the woman the US administration says is tasked with protecting Australians from “the alleged dangers of so-called ‘online harm’”, was asked to testify to Congress, which she declined, about her attempt to “silence American speech” by “colluding” with the Global Alliance for Responsible Media [Garm] to “censor” the platform then known as Twitter.

A 2022 email produced for congressman Jim Jordan’s interim report on the topic told conservatives all they needed to know about her allegiance, with Inman Grant telling Rob Rakowitz from Garm, “America is not the country of promise I grew up in”, and, with a smiley emoji attached: “Move to Australia!!!”

As the enthusiastic adoptee has said herself, she is answerable to the Australian parliament, not the US Congress. And, as someone who worked for the firm when it was known as Twitter, she knows what social media companies can do to protect their users – and why they have chosen not to do it.

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From the age of five, Inman Grant and her sister were raised in Seattle by their single mother, a time she credits with fostering her independence and resilience. Her mother worked for the City of Seattle, where serial killer Ted Bundy was a colleague, Inman Grant told Time magazine. But the city is better known for being a tech cradle and, after working in the 102nd Congress, Inman Grant went on to work for Microsoft, which has been headquartered in Seattle – also the birthplace of Amazon – since 1979.

Twenty-six years ago, she was posted to Australia with the company. She married Australian businessman Nick Grant in the early 2000s and in 2012 moved permanently to Australia. In the early 2010s, she worked for Adobe and then for Twitter for two years, establishing its policy, safety and philanthropy programs in Australia, New Zealand and south-east Asia.

In 2017, she became eSafety commissioner under prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, four years later becoming responsible for enforcing the world-first Online Safety Act 2021.

As she helps shepherd in Wednesday’s social media ban, she wants people to “swim between the digital flags,” a reference to the water safety mantra that has become second nature on Australian beaches. She may use local metaphors to help drive her points home, but growing up in the US, the former communications minister Paul Fletcher says, is “not unhelpful” when dealing with US media and moguls.

In Australia, her background might have unfairly worked against her, says her predecessor, Alastair MacGibbon – despite her being “one of the best types” of Australians in that she chose to be here. Their 20-year association got off to what he calls a “really robust” start when she was in a regulatory affairs role at Microsoft, focusing on preventing child exploitation, and he was in the police force.

They moved on from those clashes and he knows her to be tough, strong, smart and motivated, with advocacy seemingly coming naturally to her. Plus, she is “a nice, agreeable human being, which is, frankly, not always so common in those roles.” But it’s her understanding of the DNA of the likes of X that drives her, he said.

“She knows how to solve this. She knows what these companies can actually do in terms of goodness if they turned their minds to it. She knows the people in those organisations that could do it, and she knows why they could, and she knows how they aren’t.”

Inman Grant told Guardian Australia’s Full Story podcast “I took this role nine years ago because I felt passionate about online safety. And, I tried to be an internal antagonist within three major technology companies.

“We as adults struggle sometimes to fight against these invisible forces,” she says of the deceptive design features including Snap streaks, auto play and opaque algorithms. “What chance do our children have?”

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Inman Grant never expected to become a public figure, but challenging the online zeitgeist was always going to put her in an exposed position.

“She’s been frankly courageous,” said Fletcher. “It’s a job that comes with some real pressures, and she has been subject to some fairly nasty personal criticism.” The experience gives her “even greater empathy” for people in a similar position online, he says.

She has been explicit about the threats she has received, with a Columbia University report finding tens of thousands of instances of abusive content – including rape and death threats – had been directed towards her and her family. “Targeted harassment” towards Inman Grant included 73,694 total mentions of her name or role on X on 23 April 2024 alone – the majority of which were negative.

Elon Musk took exception to her power last year when she attempted to have graphic footage of a church stabbing in Sydney removed from X. At one point, X had seven ongoing legal matters related to notices issued by the commissioner.

Musk called her a “censorship commissar” and an “unelected bureaucrat” – labels she calls “misinformation we haven’t been able to shake”.

She hit back in February this year after then newly re-elected US president Donald Trump appointed Musk to head the Department of Government Efficiency when she told a Tech Policy Design Institute event, “Look who is the unelected American bureaucrat now”. It was a small win, perhaps, given “the largest megaphone in history” had been shooting “unrelenting waves of vitriol” her way.

It has ramped up an already difficult job which, as she described in one ABC interview, as “very bruising” and “a little bit thankless”. She has been doxed, including by neo-Nazi groups on Telegram, putting her family and teen children in jeopardy.

“When your kids start being targeted and you start getting credible death threats and the police need to escort you into things and you have to walk into your office in different ways and change the way you live and carry yourself, that comes at a real cost,” she told Full Story.

Yet her children have been the way into, if not a subject of, much of her advocacy for the ban. In a November LinkedIn post, she described having a “unique laboratory” for insight into parents’ struggles with children and tech.

“With three teens at home, I too occasionally get an earful about what they all think about the impending social media delay”, she wrote. She has spoken as a parent who has felt the “very effective reverse peer pressure” of social media platforms. And she recently told the Senate how each of her children is having a different reaction to the ban.

She described one as wishing there had a been a ban for them, another as saying “good riddance” to social media, and the third as “really struggling”.

“She sees [social media] as a really key way that she engages with her friends and understands what’s happening. So every child is going to be different. And I think, as parents or carers, we really need to be weighing in.”

So like most parents from today, Inman Grant will be feeling her way through. It seems she will be doing the same as eSafety commissioner – she’s expecting some “bumps and hiccups” and knows the ban will provide no fix or instantaneous change.

There is, as she told Full Story podcast, “no playbook for this”.