X, formerly Twitter, has been fined by the Australian eSafety Commission for failure to comply with a probe into the prevention of child abuse material. Image Source: X
The X social media platform (formally Twitter) has been fined $610,500 for failing to cooperate with an Australian probe into anti-child-abuse practices.
The Australian eSafety Commission issued the fine to X as part of its report earlier this year that featured X, Google, TikTok, Twitch and Discord.
The commission said that X failed to respond to questions regarding how long the platform took to respond to reports of child abuse material, and the methods used to detect such material.
The fine is a reputational blow to the Elon Musk-owned platform, which has struggled to retain advertisers after a rise of complaints regarding its approach to moderating content.
The commission found that some these large tech companies were not meeting their required responsibilities to counter child sexual exploitation.
It also issued a warning to Google for noncompliance regarding the commission’s request for information regarding it handling of child exploitation material, stating that the search engine’s responses to some questions were “generic”.
Google refutes this assessment, saying it cooperated with the regulator and was disappointed by the issued warning.
The commission noted that X’s non-compliance was more serious, resulting in the issued fine.
As part of Australia’s eSafety laws that were updated in 2021, the eSafety commissioner, currently Julie Inman Grant, can require online service providers to report on how they are meeting the expectations of the Act.
“This was about the worst kind of harm, child sexual exploitation as well as extortion, and we need to make sure that companies have trust and safety teams, they’re using people processes and technologies to tackle this kind of content,” Inman Grant told ABC News.
“Frankly, X did not provide us with the answers to very basic questions we’d ask them like, ‘How many trust and safety people do you have left?’”
“If you’ve got answers to questions, if you’re actually putting people, processes and technology in place to tackle illegal content at scale, and globally, and if it’s your stated priority, it’s pretty easy to say.”
If X refuses to comply with the fine, the commission can purse the company in court.
Musk has said in an X post that the removal of child exploitation material is “priority #1”.
However, when responding to the commission’s questions about how the platform prevented child grooming, X responded by saying that its platform was “not a service used by large numbers of young people.”
It also told the commission that current anti-grooming technology was “not of sufficient capability or accuracy to be deployed on Twitter”.
