Australia\u2019s internet watchdog
has said the world\u2019s biggest social media firms are still
\u201cturning a blind eye\u201d to online child sex abuse material on
their platforms, and said YouTube in particular had been
unresponsive to its enquiries.
In a report released on Wednesday, the eSafety Commissioner
said YouTube, along with Apple, failed to track the
number of user reports it received of child sex abuse appearing
on their platforms and also could not say how long it took them
to respond to such reports.
The Australian government decided last week to include
YouTube in its world-first social media ban for teenagers,
following eSafety’s advice to overturn its planned exemption for
the Alphabet-owned Google’s video-sharing site.
\u201cWhen left to their own devices, these companies aren\u2019t
prioritising the protection of children and are seemingly
turning a blind eye to crimes occurring on their services,\u201d
eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said in a statement.
\u201cNo other consumer-facing industry would be given the
licence to operate by enabling such heinous crimes against
children on their premises, or services.\u201d
A Google spokesperson said \u201ceSafety\u2019s comments are rooted in
reporting metrics, not online safety performance\u201d, adding that
YouTube’s systems proactively removed over 99% of all abuse
content before being flagged or viewed.
\u201cOur focus remains on outcomes and detecting and removing
(child sexual exploitation and abuse) on YouTube,\u201d the
spokesperson said in a statement.
Meta – owner of Facebook, Instagram and Threads,
three of the biggest platforms with more than 3 billion users
worldwide – has said it prohibits graphic videos.
The eSafety Commissioner, an office set up to protect
internet users, has mandated Apple, Discord, Google, Meta,
Microsoft, Skype, Snap and WhatsApp to report
on the measures they take to address child exploitation and
abuse material in Australia.
The report on their responses so far found a \u201crange of
safety deficiencies on their services which increases the risk
that child sexual exploitation and abuse material and activity
appear on the services\u201d.
Safety gaps included failures to detect and prevent
livestreaming of the material or block links to known child
abuse material, as well as inadequate reporting mechanisms.
It said platforms were also not using \u201chash-matching\u201d
technology on all parts of their services to identify images of
child sexual abuse by checking them against a database. Google
has said before that its anti-abuse measures include
hash-matching technology and artificial intelligence.
The Australian regulator said some providers had not made
improvements to address these safety gaps on their services
despite it putting them on notice in previous years.
\u201cIn the case of Apple services and Google\u2019s YouTube, they
didn\u2019t even answer our questions about how many user reports
they received about child sexual abuse on their services or
details of how many trust and safety personnel Apple and Google<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Australia\u2019s internet watchdoghas said the world\u2019s biggest social media firms are still\u201cturning a blind eye\u201d to online child sex abuse material ontheir platforms, and said YouTube in particular had beenunresponsive to its enquiries.In a report released on Wednesday, the eSafety Commissionersaid YouTube, along with Apple, failed to track thenumber of user reports it received of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32063","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\n