X left questions empty when probed about online safety, says eSafety commissioner

Social media giants have for too long gotten away with ignoring questions from government and other online regulators, says Australia’s eSafety commissioner Julie Inman Grant.

Elon Musk’s X has been fined over $600,000 for failing to comply with questions from the e-Safety Office. Picture: AFP

Social media giants have left blank answers to questions from government and other online regulators, and that behaviour will no longer be tolerated, Australia’s eSafety commissioner Julie Inman Grant says.

Ms Inman Grant, speaking at South by Southwest in Sydney on Monday, said many companies including X (formerly known as Twitter) would just ignore questions in requests from regulators when asked about their actions towards removing harmful online content.

“Some of these companies are just not even providing answers or leaving entire questions blank (when asked),” she said.

One question X had dodged completely, she said, was the number of people in its trust and safety department. “Clearly, if you‘ve got a HR or payroll system, you know the answer,” she said.

“Let’s be honest, if you can build a sophisticated AI system and targeted advertising with deadly precision, you should be able to do the same with the removal of hate speech or known child sexual abuse material.

“Instead, what we’re seeing is companies are making it harder; they’re making their platforms more opaque by putting the Twitter fire hose, for instance, out of the reach of advocates and NGOs and small regulators.”

X did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The eSafety office on Monday issued an infringement of more than $600,000 to X after the company failed to comply with questions from the regulator in relation to a new report on child sexual exploitation, sexual extortion and the live-streaming of child sexual abuse. Search engine giant Google also was issued a warning but not a fine.

Australia’s eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant.

“eSafety also found that two providers, Twitter/X and Google, did not comply with the notices given to them, with both companies failing to adequately respond to a number of questions in their respective notices,” the statement read.

“Twitter/X’s noncompliance was found to be more serious with the company failing to provide any response to some questions, leaving some sections entirely blank. In other instances, Twitter/X provided a response that was otherwise incomplete and/or inaccurate.”

Ms Inman Grant said social media giants typically found requests for transparency to be “uncomfortable”.

“The simple fact of the matter is that transparency is very uncomfortable for these companies because they haven‘t had to deliver it, (at least) not in a meaningful way, and not answering questions with datasets without qualifiers that they want to provide,” she said.

“When we think about the current situation with Discord, and some of the Google services and Twitter, none of them are using our live detection tools for child sexual abuse on live streaming services.”