An Australian controller has sent lawful letters to Twitter and Google requesting information about their efforts to prevent online child molestation, drawing them into a clampdown that has already put a lot of pressure on other global technology firms. The action by the country’s e-safety superintendent puts the spotlight on the anti-exploitation practices at Twitter, which is owned by billionaire Elon Musk, who has declared child protection his highest priority while also laying off even more than half of the remaining workforce since taking over last October.
“With Elon Musk announcing child sexual abuse a top priority,” e-safety council member Julie Inman Grant told Reuters in a discussion, referring to several of Musk’s tweets. She stated that it was in Twitter’s best interests to demonstrate that it was taking effective steps to remove child sexual abuse content, or else advertisers would abandon the company. Inman Grant, who worked as Twitter’s public policy director until 2016, said the reactions of larger tech firms, combined with findings of softer content moderation at Twitter since Musk took over, urged her to take action.
After Musk’s buyout, Twitter closed its Australian office, so there was no local member to respond to Reuters, and an inquiry about the matter sent to the San Francisco-based firm’s mainstream press email address was not immediately responded to. In addition to Twitter, the commissioner wrote to Alphabet Inc’s Google, which owns YouTube and the file storage facility Google Drive, and China’s TikTok.
Google’s senior manager of government relations and public policy Samantha Yorke said abuse substance had no place on the company’s systems and “we utilize a range of standard industry imaging modalities including hash-matching and machine learning to detect and eliminate that has been posted to our services”.
TikTok’s policy manager for Australia Jed Horner said in a declaration the company had a zero-tolerance approach to propagation of abuse material with more than 40,000 safety skilled professionals “who develop and enforce our policies, and build technologies and procedures to detect, remove or restrict violative content at scale”. Under new Australian laws, the e-safety commissioner, an office established to protect internet users, can compel internet companies to provide detailed information about the frequency of child trafficking on their platforms and the steps they are taking to combat it.
The commissioner issued similar notifications to Apple Inc, Microsoft Corp, and Facebook owner Meta Systems last year. Following receipt of their responses, the regulator deemed their practices inadequate. According to Inman Grant, a public inquiry with the Canadian Centre for Children’s Services in 2020 discovered widespread publicly available abuse content on Twitter, which those officials reported to Twitter’s head of confidence and security.
