Tech giants urged to do more to remove child sexual abuse material

The e-Safety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant has accused some social media giants of "turning a blind eye" to online child sex abuse material.

Transcript

00:00She said that she's concerned that some of these companies haven't really lifted their

00:06game in the area of blocking child abuse material in the past three years, that this has been

00:12an issue for the government.

00:14The government currently mandates tech companies to report back to the eSafety Commissioner

00:19every six months on what it's doing to try and block child abuse material, on trying

00:24to prevent child abuse material from being uploaded to platforms.

00:28But Julian Grant says that YouTube and Apple, for example, haven't actually responded to

00:34her specific questions about that and she's concerned that she's not getting information

00:39from them about how long it's taking them to respond to complaints about child abuse

00:44material, for example.

00:46The Office of eSafety is monitoring many companies and what it's doing in this area, they say

00:52that there are some safety gaps.

00:54For example, live streaming is not being blocked as it should be potentially.

01:00Julian Grant was on the ABC this morning and said she is concerned about the transparency

01:05with this issue in some of these companies.

01:08What this suggests to me is that we're seeing this continued evisceration of trust and safety

01:14teams.

01:15The investment in keeping kids safer online and rolling back of policies that leaves more

01:21harmful content.

01:22So making these platforms much more perilous for our children.

01:26The requirement to report like this is something that the Australian government is sort of going

01:31alone on.

01:32It's part of these new tech industry standards that Australia is putting in place to try and

01:37prevent things like child abuse material to make the online world safer for children.

01:42So let's go ahead.