Tech giants to be reined in by eSafety code

Tech giants will be forced to tackle child sexual abuse and pro-terrorist material under new mandatory standards, after ‘resistance’ to act on abhorrent material.

eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant at Senate estimates last month. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Tech giants will be forced to tackle child sexual abuse and pro-terrorist material on their platforms under new mandatory standards to be imposed by the eSafety Commissioner, after “resistance” from some of the world’s biggest companies to tackle abhorrent ­material.

The new standards, which were due to be submitted to parliament on Friday morning, would be enforceable and require industry – including cloud storage services, artificial intelligence services, and dating apps – to stop videos of torture and rape spreading on the internet

The Australian revealed in March that child abuse investi­gators were bracing for expanded encryption on Facebook and Messenger to have crushing impacts that might be disguised by a rise in meaningless tips that led nowhere.

Writing in The Australian, eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant has now warned that cloud ser­vices and messaging apps are a “free haven for pedophiles”.

“We know cloud-based file and photo storage services (and) many messaging services serve as a free haven for pedophiles to host, store and distribute child sexual exploitation material; companies who own and operate them must take responsibility for this misuse and act to disrupt and deter it,” she writes.

The intervention comes after the industry failed to produce voluntary codes that, according to the eSafety Commissioner, could sufficiently “provide appropriate community safeguards” in relation to harmful content.

In Friday’s The Australian, Ms Inman Grant says “resistance from industry during the public consultation earlier this year was more robust than we expected” and industry figures claimed the standards would unleash a “dystopian future of widespread government surveillance”.

“Hyperbole aside, if you really want to know what a dystopia looks like, imagine a world where adults fail to protect children from the most vile forms of torture and sexual abuse, then allow their trauma to be freely shared with predators on a global scale.

“That is precisely the world we are living in today.”

The new standards will apply to Designated Internet Services – like apps, websites, cloud storage services, artificial intelligence services – and Relevant Electronic Services – like encrypted messaging apps, dating sites, online games, and more.

Ms Inman Grant said the standards would grant greater protection to Australians from the “worst of the worst” online content. “We understand different services may require different interventions but the clear message of these standards is that no company or service can simply absolve themselves from responsibility for clear and tangible actions in combating child sexual abuse and pro-terror material on their services.”

She stressed the new standards would not require encrypted messaging platforms like Meta’s WhatsApp and Signal to break end-to-end encryption or introduce systematic vulnerabilities.

“At their heart, the standards are designed to encourage innovation and investment in technologies that improve safety,” she wrote. “We are challenging big tech businesses and the industry as a whole, to harness its collective brilliance, vast financial resources and sophisticated tools to help address profoundly damaging content hosted on and distributed by their services.”

She lashed the tech giants for failing to include a number of guarantees in the earlier voluntary standard she rejected. “They did not include a wholesale commitment to deploy any of the commonly used, privacy-preserving methods that detect known child sexual abuse material and known pro-terror material,” she writes.

“And there was no solid commitment by industry to invest in future detection technologies or more robust reporting mechanisms. We even encountered resistance by some services to commit to enforcing their existing policies relating to child sexual abuse material.”

A recent global study estimated that more than 300 million children were victims of online sexual abuse and exploitation a year.