The Office of eSafety says that since Elon Musk’s layoffs there are no longer Australian staff at Twitter that the office can report child abuse material to. Source: Twitter
The Office of the eSafety, Australia’s online safety regulator, says there are no longer Australian staff at Twitter that the regulator can report child abuse material to.
This comes after the mass firings by Twitter’s CEO, Elon Musk, shut down the team.
The office’s acting chief operating officer Toby Dagg told a parliamentary committee that the regulator no longer has a direct line to Twitter, which was vital to keeping children safe.
“We share your concerns about the stripping out of Twitter’s capacity to respond to child sexual exploitation, in particular. There are no Australian staff left here,” Officer Dagg said.
“The Australian complement was a really critical component of Twitter’s safety apparatus as far as we were concerned.”
The eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, had wrote to Musk with her concerns about how the firing of Twitter’s Australian staff has affected the regulator’s ability to deal with child exploitation material on the social media platform.
After Musk took over the company last October, Musk said that removing child abuse material was his “Priority #1”.
In Novermber, Musk began widespread cuts across the company, with Australian staff finding they were locked out of company systems.
After the cuts, Twitter had reassured Australia’s regulator that the cuts wouldn’t hurt online safety and the company would still comply with Australian laws in a timely fashion.
The issue was raised in the parliamentary inquiry by Greens Senator David Shoebridge, who believes that it is “plain wrong” that tech companies like Twitter could fire local staff without consequence.
“Given the proliferation of online exploitation material, it’s remarkable there are zero local staff to respond to complaints and no Australian office whose job it is to remove offensive or dangerous material,” said Senator Shoebridge.
“Apart from Meta, big tech refused to even appear at the inquiry today, proving yet again they think they’re beyond the reach of the law.”
Commissioner Inman Grant noted that she is considering a mandatory code of conduct for social media companies, after the federal government granted her the power to do so.
She told the parliament that she has rejected draft codes written by industry members, as the proposed community safety safeguards were inefficient.
She also said that the companies were doing “shockingly little” to address the issue on their platforms.
Today’s full parliamentary hearing can be viewed here.
