Australia finds serious gaps in Big Tech response to online child sexual abuse

Australia’s internet regulator has found what it describes as serious shortcomings in the way major technology companies respond to online child sexual abuse and sexual extortion, saying firms including Apple, Meta and Google are not making full use of tools already available to them.

In a transparency report released Tuesday, eSafety said online platforms had “significant gaps” in tackling abuse on their services. The regulator said companies were failing to use technologies that can detect known coercion patterns used by sexual extortion offenders, even after it had shared evidence of how criminals were exploiting their platforms.

“Even when we’ve laid this out, we haven’t seen adequate responses, despite the technology being readily available,” eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said, according to the report.

The latest assessment is part of a series of reports eSafety has been issuing under Australia’s Basic Online Safety Expectations rules, which require large platforms to report regularly on how they prevent child sexual exploitation and abuse. This third report in a planned four-part series focuses mainly on sexual extortion, a form of online blackmail in which offenders threaten to release intimate material unless victims comply with their demands.

eSafety said it received more than 2,000 complaints about sexual extortion between July and December 2025, with young men aged 18 to 24 most frequently affected. The regulator also cited a previous study showing that more than one in 10 teenagers aged 16 to 18 had been targeted by sexual extortion, and that more than half of those victims were first targeted before age 16.

The report said investigators found the same methods being used across multiple scams, but that companies were not consistently detecting them. It pointed to gaps in reporting systems across services such as WhatsApp, iMessage, Discord and Google Messages, saying some platforms lacked clear and accessible ways for users to report sexual extortion or child abuse, while others did not offer dedicated categories for those harms.

The regulator also said technology capable of better detecting livestreamed child sexual abuse already exists, but is not being used consistently. At the same time, eSafety noted some companies had made improvements. These included Google and Snap stepping up proactive detection of known child sexual abuse material, Discord blocking links to abuse content, Meta introducing new tools to spot grooming, and Microsoft detecting live abuse in video calls.

The findings come as Australia steps up pressure on major tech firms. In June, the government introduced legislation to give eSafety more power to take companies to court if they fail to comply with Australia’s ban on social media use for under-16s. Australia was the first country to introduce such a ban, and other countries, including Britain and several European nations, have since moved toward similar measures.

The regulator has also raised concerns about children’s safety on chat and gaming platforms. In April, it asked some gaming services to explain how they protect children from grooming by sexual predators.

The report is based on a monitored public feed and highlights a widening regulatory push in Australia for stronger safeguards across online platforms. Source attribution near the end: Dawn Tech reported the findings first, citing the eSafety transparency report.

Source: Dawn Tech - https://www.dawn.com/news/2015338/australia-finds-serious-gaps-in-big-tech-response-to-online-child-sexual-abuse