Australia’s eSafety Commissioner expresses disappointment with Big Tech Senate Hearing

Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant has accused Big Tech firms of doing far too little to combat the online spread of objectionable material.

In an opinion piece in The Australian newspaper, Ms. Inman Grant claims “many companies weren’t even using available tools and technologies to detect child sexual exploitation and abuse material, let alone detecting grooming or live-streamed child abuse.”

Nor did they have effective barriers to stop users, banned from their platforms, from creating new accounts, and from re-offending.

Over the past two years, she said, the Office of the eSafety Commissioner found online safety protocols lacking across more than 27 tech services, including Apple, Meta, X, Microsoft, TikTok, Snap, and Google.

While welcoming a U.S. Senate hearing featuring Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, and X CEO Linda Yaccarino, to testify, the commissioner felt others were let off the hook.

“The hearing was just as notable for the important and pivotal players who were not called to appear, including tech giants Apple, Google and Microsoft,” she wrote.

Those who did appear offered only “more of the same apologies and platitudes without any concrete commitment to take immediate action to protect children,” Ms. Inman Grant said.

“It came as no surprise to me that many of the assembled senators emerged from this process frustrated, particularly as a number of the CEOs continued to push back on supporting proposed new U.S. child protection legislation.”

The eSafety commissioner said it took six years from the time her office was first established in 2015, “after hitting brick wall after brick wall with the platforms,” that the Australian government legislated to give the commissioner power to compulsorily collect information by passing the Online Safety Act.

“One of the biggest disappointments was to see Google and X—two of the most widely known companies in the world—did not fully comply with the notices I sent them, failing to answer key questions even though they related to crimes against children,” Ms. Inman Grant wrote.

This resulted in her issuing Google with a formal warning, and X with a fine of $610,500 “due to the scale of its noncompliance.” X has yet to pay the fine and so the commissioner has issued civil proceedings in the Federal Court of Australia.

While X Corp has established a new Trust and Safety Centre of Excellence, employing 100 new full-time content moderators focused on child protection, Ms. Inman Grant pointed out the company had cut more than 2,000 trust and safety staff following its acquisition by Elon Musk in October 2022.

“The unprecedented explosion in online child sexual exploitation we are witnessing is difficult for everyone to confront, including tech executives, but we cannot bury our heads in the sand,” the commissioner said.