Oct. 16 (UPI) — Australia’s online safety regulator fined Elon Musk’s X social media platform $386,000 on Monday for failing to show what it is doing to tackle the proliferation of child sexual exploitation, sexual extortion and the live streaming of child sexual abuse.
The regulator’s Basic Online Safety Expectations report singles out X, formerly Twitter, for “serious shortfalls” in how it was tackling the rise in sexual extortion and failing to comply with legal notices requiring it to answer questions about measures it had in place to deal with the problem, the eSafety Commissioner said in a news release.
Among five companies probed — X, Google, TikTok, Twitch and Discord — X was the only one to receive a fine as its non-compliance was found to be more serious because it ignored some questions, leaving some sections blank or provided responses that were incomplete or inaccurate, or both.
Key questions X failed to answer included its response time to reports of child sexual exploitation, measures it has in place to detect child sexual exploitation in live streams, and the tools and technologies it uses to detect child sexual exploitation content.
“Twitter/X has stated publicly that tackling child sexual exploitation is the number 1 priority for the company, but it can’t just be empty talk, we need to see words backed up with tangible action,” said eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant.
“If Twitter/X and Google can’t come up with answers to key questions about how they are tackling child sexual exploitation they either don’t want to answer for how it might be perceived publicly or they need better systems to scrutinize their own operations.
“Both scenarios are concerning to us and suggest they are not living up to their responsibilities and the expectations of the Australian community,” Inman Grant said.
X was also criticized for only employing language analysis technology to detect CSEA activity — not across all of its services — and then only for 12 languages, compared with 73 and 71 used by TikTok and Google respectively. That meant some of the top five languages spoken in Australia were not covered, according to the regulator.
The company failed to use technology to detect grooming although it did use reputable databases in order to block links to known child sexual exploitation material, unlike some of its rivals.
It also failed to adequately answer questions regarding the number of safety and public policy staff remaining in post at the company after mass layoffs, particularly among content moderation personnel, following Musk’s takeover of the company in October 2022. However, it did admit its detection of child sexual exploitation material dipped to 75%, down from 95%, in the three months after X changed hands but had since improved to an unspecified level.
The report said X and Google’s failure to answer key questions was “disappointing” given they were related to child protection and online harm at its worst.
X has 28 days to request the withdrawal of the infringement notice or to pay the penalty. Should it choose not to pay the infringement notice, it is open to the commissioner to take further action.
The fine comes as X has been increasingly in the crosshairs of regulators in Europe for allegedly disseminating anti-Semitic speech and hatred toward minorities and the LBGTQ community, and disinformation about the Israel-Hamas war.
Germany’s anti-discrimination agency quit the platform Wednesday over what it called “intolerable” levels of hate content on X. A day earlier, the European Union wrote to Musk threatening X with fines that could amount to as much as 6% of its revenue if it does not clean up its act.