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Australia’s eSafety Watchdog Says Tech Giants Still Failing to Detect Online Child Sexual Abuse

Companies must deliver further updates within six months or face daily fines.

Overview

  • The second eSafety transparency snapshot reports major gaps in proactive detection for live-streamed abuse on services including Messenger, Google Meet, FaceTime, Discord, Microsoft Teams, Snapchat and WhatsApp.
  • Apple, Discord, Google’s Chat, Meet and Messages, Microsoft Teams, Skype and Snap are not using language-analysis tools to spot sexual extortion despite receiving lists of common indicators from eSafety.
  • The regulator noted incremental improvements, including Microsoft expanding detection in OneDrive and Outlook, Snap cutting moderation response times from 90 minutes to 11 minutes, and image-blurring features from Google and Apple for some accounts.
  • Australia’s Centre to Counter Child Exploitation received nearly 83,000 CSAM reports in 2024–25, a 41% increase from the previous year, underscoring rising harm on mainstream platforms.
  • eSafety set next reporting deadlines for March and August 2026 and launched a public dashboard to track progress, while Meta said it would review feedback and Snap pledged cooperation as Apple, Microsoft and Google did not comment.