Australia’s eSafety commissioner fined X, formerly called Twitter, on Sunday for failing to meet the country’s Online Safety Act requirements. Australia accused the social media platform of not taking the necessary steps to tackle child sexual exploitation content on X, including sexual extortion and live-streaming abuse.
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Commissioner Julie Inman Grant issued X a $610,500 AUD ($386,147) fine for failing to comply with previous warnings that it needed to reel in child exploitation content. X has 28 days to pay the fine or request a withdrawal of the infringement notice, but if the time elapses without an adequate response, the news release states that the commissioner will be open to taking other action.
Other Big Tech companies received similar warnings to take action against child sexual abuse and sexual exploitation including Google, TikTok, Twitch and Discord. The commissioner identified Google as having not provided adequate responses to a questionnaire sent out in February about the measures the tech companies put in place to moderate content.
While Google allegedly did not provide sufficient responses, Grant said in the news release that “X’s non-compliance was found to be more serious.” X did not respond to some questions, and the company left some sections completely blank while providing other incomplete or inaccurate responses, according to the release.
Grant says X ignored many of the child exploitation questions “including the time it takes the platform to respond to reports of child sexual exploitation; the measures it has in place to detect child sexual exploitation in livestreams; and the tools and technologies it uses to detect child sexual exploitation material.”
In the year since Elon Musk bought X for a record-breaking $44 billion, the detection of child sexual exploitation dropped from 90% to 75%, according to the release.
“Twitter/X has stated publicly that tackling child sexual exploitation is the number 1 priority for the company, but it can’t just be empty talk, we need to see words backed up with tangible action,” Grant said.
She says if 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 scrutinize their own operations. “Both scenarios are concerning to us and suggest they are not living up to their responsibilities and the expectations of the Australian community,” Grant added.
Australia implemented the Online Safety Act in 2021 requiring online companies to provide information about their safety practices or face a fine. Under the Safety Act, the tech companies have to meet all expectations including protecting children from harmful or unlawful content, putting reporting mechanisms for users to issue complaints, and responding to requests by the eSafety commissioner, among others.
“Frankly, I was surprised at how hard it was to extract precise and accurate information, and frankly, surprised that some companies that should have much more sophisticated and mature systems and resources didn’t seem willing or able to be able to provide that information that had been provided by other companies,” Inman Grant told The Guardian on Sunday. “Or in the case of Twitter, to leave things totally blank, to obfuscate [from providing] inaccurate information.”
Grant says she wasn’t able to get direct answers about how many trust and safety employees still work at X since Musk took over the company. In December, Musk disbanded X’s Trust and Safety Council which was responsible for moderating content such as child exploitation.