Australian regulator asks Twitter, Google to hand over information on curbing online child abuse

An Australian regulator that has already put pressure on other global tech firms has now sent legal letters to Twitter and Google askingthem to hand over information about their efforts to stop 'online child abuse.'

The move by the country's e-safety commissioner keeps a spotlight on the anti-exploitation practices at 'Twitter' under the new ownership of Tesla CEOElon Musk, who called 'child protection,' his top priority.

Referring to Musk's tweets, e-safety commissioner Julie Inman Grant told Reuters, "with Elon Musk declaring child sexual abuse a top priority, this is an opportunity for him to explain what he is indeed doing."

She added thatthis move isin Twitter's interestto show that it is effectively workingto eradicate child sexual abuse material, which could possibly turn the advertisers away.

Grant, who earlier had served as thepublic policy director for the microblogging siteuntil 2016, said the responses from larger tech firms, coupled with reports of loosecontent moderation at Twitter since Musk took over, prompted her to take this action.

Apart from writing to Twitter, the commissioner also sent these letters to Alphabet Inc's Google, to the owner of YouTube andChina's TikTok.

Responding to the letter, Google's senior manager of government affairs and public policy Samantha Yorke said, "we utilise a range of industry standard scanning techniques including hash-matching technology and artificial intelligence to identify and remove (child abuse material) that has been uploaded to our services."

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On the other hand, TikTok's policy manager for Australia Jed Horner in a statement said that the company had a 'zero-tolerance approach to the dissemination of abuse material,'with over40,000 safety professionals across the world who develop and enforce policies, build processes and technologies that coulddetect, remove or restrict violative content at scale.

As per new laws in Australia, the e-safety commissioner can compel techcompanies to give detailed information about theexploitation on their platforms and about measures they take to preventit.

According to estimates, companies that fail to cooperate will face fines of up to$478,000 per day.

Last year, the e-commissioner sent similar letters to Apple Inc, Microsoft Corp and Facebook owner Meta Platforms. However, after receiving their responses, the commissioner called their practices 'inadequate.'

(With inputs from agencies)

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