Posted: 2023-02-22 13:25:20

Twitter, TikTok and Google have been hit with legal threats from Australia's eSafety commissioner, who is demanding information on what they are doing to combat the vile trade in child exploitation material on their platforms.

Legal notices were issued to the companies, as well as Twitch and Discord, on Wednesday afternoon, along with a deadline of 35 days to respond or face daily fines of up to $700,000.

"We've been asking a number of these platforms for literally years: what are you doing to proactively detect and remove child sexual abuse material?" eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant told the ABC.

"And we've gotten what I would describe, as, you know, not quite radical transparency."

It is the second time the commissioner has issued such legal notices, having pursued Microsoft, Apple and Meta — the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — last year.

Ms Inman Grant said there were genuine concerns about how tech giants were monitoring harmful material on their sites — particularly platforms such as Twitter, which has been the subject of significant criticism since it was taken over by billionaire Elon Musk.

"This isn't a fishing expedition. There's been a lot of research and resources that go into this," she said.

"With the first set of basic online safety expectation notices … we had a lot of suspicions about what some of the big players like Apple, Microsoft and Meta were doing.

"This actually validated that we actually don't really understand the full scale and the scope of child sexual exploitation that might be on the common cloud services and email services we're using every day."

Microsoft not using its own detection tool

The commissioner said Microsoft had developed a tool, known as PhotoDNA, to detect and remove such material.

"They weren't even eating their own dog food, as we say in the tech industry," Ms Inman Grant said.

"They weren't using it on a number of their services like OneDrive, like Skype and some of the other platforms like Hotmail."

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