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Australia‘s internet watchdog has said the world’s biggest social media firms are still “turning a blind eye” 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 GOOGL.O video-sharing site.
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.
“In the case of Apple services and Google’s YouTube, they didn’t 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 have on-staff,” Inman Grant said.
