An Australian regulatory body has issued legal notices to Twitter and Google, demanding details about their strategies to combat online child exploitation. This move is part of a broader initiative aimed at increasing accountability among tech companies operating in the region.
The e-safety commissioner of Australia has turned attention towards Twitter, particularly under the leadership of Elon Musk, who has emphasized child protection as a major focus despite significant staff reductions since his acquisition of the platform. Reports indicate that more than half of Twitter’s workforce has been laid off since Musk’s takeover in October 2022.
Julie Inman Grant, Australia’s e-safety commissioner, stated in an interview with Reuters that this scenario presents an opportunity for Musk to clarify the company’s actions towards preventing child sexual abuse, referring to his previous statements on the matter.
Inman Grant remarked that it is critical for Twitter to demonstrate effective actions against child sexual abuse material, as their failure to do so could result in a decline in advertiser interest.
Following the closure of Twitter’s Australian office after the buyout, there was no local representative available for comment, and inquiries sent to the company’s media relations did not receive a timely response.
In addition to Twitter, legal notices were also dispatched to Google, the parent company of YouTube and Google Drive, as well as TikTok, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance.
Samantha Yorke, Google’s senior manager for government affairs and public policy, stated that abusive material is strictly prohibited on their platforms. She detailed that the company employs a variety of industry-standard scanning technologies, including hash-matching and artificial intelligence, to identify and eliminate child abuse material uploaded to their services.
TikTok’s Australian policy manager, Jed Horner, affirmed the company’s zero-tolerance stance on the spread of abusive content, citing a global workforce of over 40,000 safety professionals dedicated to developing and enforcing policy and technology aimed at detecting and removing harmful content.
New Australian legislation empowers the e-safety commissioner to require internet platforms to disclose specific data regarding the prevalence of child exploitation on their sites, along with the steps taken to address the issue.
Failure to comply with these requests could result in fines of up to AUD 700,000 (approximately USD 478,000 or INR 3.95 crore) per day.
Last year, similar notices were sent to major tech firms, including Apple, Microsoft, and Meta Platforms, with the commissioner later deeming their responses inadequate.
A 2020 investigation carried out by Inman Grant’s team and the Canadian Centre for Child Protection revealed a significant amount of publicly accessible abuse material on Twitter, which was subsequently reported to the company’s head of trust and safety.
Inman Grant raised concerns about Musk’s leadership, claiming that the dismantling of the trust and safety team, alongside the reduction of local public policy staff, has enabled harmful actors to proliferate on the platform.
Despite the closure of its Australian office, Inman Grant noted that her agency possesses the authority to impose fines on companies located overseas, though she expressed hope that public scrutiny would encourage Twitter to cooperate.
(1 AUD equals 1.4637 USD)
© Thomson Reuters 2023
