Musk's X fined for not disclosing info on child abuse content

Sydney: Australia’s eSafety commissioner has imposed a fine of 6,10,500 Australian dollars (over $380,000) on Elon Musk-owned X (formerly Twitter) for failing to disclose required information on how it detects, removes, and prevents child sexual abuse material.

eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, in a statement, said that along with X, Google has also been issued a formal warning, for not complying with the notices given to them and failing to adequately respond to a number of questions in their respective notices.

Grant said that the proliferation of online child sexual exploitation is a growing problem both in Australia and globally, and technology companies have a moral responsibility in protecting children from sexual exploitation and abuse being stored, shared, and perpetrated on their services.

“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 Grant late on Sunday.

Twitter/X’s non-compliance was found to be more serious with the company failing to provide any response to some questions, leaving some sections entirely blank.

The Musk-owned company also failed to adequately answer questions relating to the number of safety and public policy staff still employed at Twitter/X following the October 2022 acquisition and subsequent job cuts.

X has 28 days to respond to or pay the eSafety office’s fine.

“If Twitter chooses not to pay the infringement notice, it is open to the Commissioner to take other action. eSafety has also published a statement, called a service provider notification, about the non-compliance by Twitter/X,”

“Our first report featuring Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Skype, Snap, WhatsApp, and Omegle uncovered serious shortfalls in how these companies were tackling this issue,” Grant stressed.

“This latest report also reveals similar gaps in how these five tech companies are dealing with the problem and how they are tackling the rise in sexual extortion and we need them all to do better,” she added.

Google has been issued a formal warning, notifying it of its failure to comply due to the company providing a number of generic responses to specific questions and providing aggregated information when asked questions about specific services, she said.

“Google is not using its own technology to detect known child sexual exploitation videos on some of its services -- Gmail, Chat, Messages,” the report mentioned.

While YouTube, TikTok, and Twitch are taking steps to detect child sexual exploitation in live streams, Discord is not, saying it is ‘prohibitively expensive’.

With inputs from IANS