eSafety Commissioner wants Twitter, TikTok, and Google to answer hard questions about child abuse online.

Australia's eSafety Commissioner sent legal notices to social media giants Twitter and TikTok, as well as one of the world's biggest technology companies, Google, asking them to answer tough questions about how they are dealing with online child sexual abuse.

The notices were sent out as part of the Online Safety Act 2021, which is a key part of the new Basic Online Safety Expectations from the Australian government. Notices were also sent to Twitch, a site for livestreaming, and Discord, a site for online chat and instant messaging.

Questions will also be asked about how these companies are dealing with the growing problem of online sexual extortion and how their algorithms might be amplifying very harmful content.

Julie Inman Grant, who is in charge of eSafety, said that the Expectations list the safety measures that tech companies in Australia should take to protect their users, especially children, from harm.

"The making, sharing, and watching of sexual abuse of children online causes unimaginable pain and ruins lives. And it's against the law. "It is very important that tech companies do everything they can to get rid of this content from their platforms and services," said Ms. Inman Grant.

"From the first round of letters we sent to companies in August, including Apple and Microsoft, we learned that many aren't taking simple steps to protect children and aren't using widely available technology like PhotoDNA to find and get rid of this kind of content.

"Back in November, Twitter CEO Elon Musk tweeted that stopping the exploitation of children was 'Priority #1.' However, we haven't seen any details about how Twitter plans to keep this promise.

"We've also seen a lot of layoffs of key trust and safety employees across the company. These are the people whose job it is to keep kids safe, so we want to know how Twitter plans to deal with this problem in the future.

"These powers are meant to shine a light on these platforms and make the internet safer by forcing them to answer questions directly."

If the companies don't respond to the notices within 35 days, they could be fined almost $700,000 a day.

Online child sexual exploitation is a worldwide problem, and in 2021, tech companies sent more than 29 million reports to the US National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children.

Ms. Inman Grant said that these reports look like they are just the tip of a very big iceberg. Since 2017, eSafety has dealt with more than 76,000 reports of child sexual exploitation content. They think there is a lot more child sexual exploitation content hiding below the surface.

The Expectations are meant to work with proposed new mandatory codes that the online industry is working on to deal with the risk of class 1 content, such as material that exploits children sexually, on their services. These two types of regulation are important for dealing with this problem on a large scale, and they will force online service providers to make their platforms harder for predators and paedophiles to use.

The eSafety Commissioner recently asked industry associations to respond to eSafety's areas of concern in their latest draught of the codes and resubmit them with the right community safeguards.

The eSafety Commissioner will then decide if the industry codes will be registered or if industry standards will be set. Once they are in place, the rules in codes or standards for an industry will be enforced.

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