Australia slaps fine on X over child safety

The news: Australia’s eSafety Commissioner says some of the biggest tech companies are not living up to their responsibilities to tackle the spread of child sexual exploitation.

The numbers: The regulator has issued a legal infringement notice to social media platform Twitter, now called X, for compliance failures in relation to tackling child sexual exploitation. It has 28 days to respond or pay the $610,500 penalty. Search giant Google has also been handed a formal warning for exhibiting a lack of transparency.

The context: The action comes after failure of tech companies to adequately respond to questions about how they detect, remove and prevent child sexual abuse material, grooming and extortion. The eSafety Commissioner issued “please explain” notices to Twitter, Google, TikTok, Twitch and Discord in February. Google is alleged to have provided generic and aggregated responses to specific requests for information, while X failed to provide any response to some questions, and incomplete and/or inaccurate responses in other instances. Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said the proliferation of online child sexual exploitation was growing and tech companies had a moral responsibility to protect children from sexual exploitation and abuse being stored, shared and perpetrated.

What they said: “If Twitter/X and Google can’t come up with answers to key questions about how they are tackling child sexual exploitation they either don’t want to answer for how it might be perceived publicly or they need better systems to scrutinise their own operations," eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said in the regulator’s latest report.