Australia's eSafety Commissioner Welcomes Global Regulatory Focus on X After French Raid
Australia's eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, has declared that the global regulatory focus on Elon Musk's social media platform X has reached a "tipping point" following a significant raid on the company's offices in France earlier this week. The raid, conducted by Paris cybercrime units on Tuesday, forms part of a broader investigation into serious alleged offences.
French Raid Investigates Alleged Child Abuse and Deepfake Violations
The investigation in France includes allegations of:
- Complicity in the possession and organised distribution of child abuse images
- Violation of image rights through sexualised deepfakes
- Denial of crimes against humanity
This development comes as multiple countries, including the United Kingdom and Australia, alongside the European Union, have launched investigations into X in recent weeks. These investigations follow revelations that the platform's AI chatbot, Grok, was being used to mass-produce sexualised images of women and children in response to user requests.
Global Condemnation of "Carelessly Developed" Technology
Inman Grant told Guardian Australia: "It's nice to no longer be a soloist, and be part of a choir. We've been having so many productive discussions with other regulators around the globe and researchers that are doing important work in this space."
She emphasised that "this really represents a tipping point. This is global condemnation of carelessly developed technology that could be generating child sexual abuse material and non-consensual, sexual imagery at scale."
Following the international outcry, X has taken several measures including:
- Turning off Grok image-generation capabilities for all but paid users
- Vowing to implement changes to prevent users from creating declothed images of real people
eSafety's Latest Report on Tech Platform Accountability
The regulatory actions against X coincide with the release of the eSafety commissioner's latest report on Thursday, which examines how technology platforms are preventing child sexual abuse and exploitation on their services.
In July 2024, eSafety issued notices to several major platforms requiring six-monthly updates on their safety measures. The companies receiving notices included:
- Apple
- Discord
- Meta
- Microsoft
- Skype (which no longer exists under Microsoft ownership)
Mixed Progress Among Major Tech Platforms
Inman Grant reported that while there have been some improvements across the industry, significant gaps remain in platform safety measures. Apple, which she noted had previously viewed privacy and safety as mutually exclusive concepts, has made the most substantial progress.
"[Apple is] really putting an investment ... and engaging and developing their communication safety features and evolving those," she stated.
In 2024, Apple began rolling out features allowing children to report nude images and videos sent to them directly to the company, which could then report such messages to law enforcement authorities.
Persistent Safety Gaps Across Multiple Platforms
Despite these improvements, Inman Grant identified several areas where platforms continue to fall short:
- Inadequate detection of live child abuse or exploitation on FaceTime
- Similar shortcomings on Meta's Messenger, Google Meet, Snapchat, Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp and Discord
- Failure to use language analysis to proactively detect sexual extortion on several services
She expressed particular concern about this patchy approach to safety implementation: "It's surprising to me that they're not attending to the services where the most egregious and devastating harms are happening to kids. It's like they're not totally weatherproofing the entire house. They're putting up spackle on the walls and maybe taping the windows, but not fixing the roof."
Notable Safety Improvements Across the Industry
The eSafety commissioner did acknowledge several positive developments among technology companies:
- Microsoft has improved detection of known child abuse material on OneDrive and in email attachments within Outlook
- Snap has reduced the time to process reports of child abuse material from 90 minutes to just 11 minutes
- Google has launched sensitive content warnings that blur images containing nudity before viewing
The companies receiving notices will be required to report to eSafety twice more this year – in March and August. Inman Grant emphasised that these transparency reports have opened the "black box" on what companies are actually doing to protect users and will assist with future regulatory investigations.
X's Ongoing Legal Challenge Against Australian Regulator
Notably, X was not included in the recent round of notices issued to other technology platforms. The company is currently challenging eSafety's issuing of a similar notice in March 2024, with that legal case still ongoing through Australian courts.
This legal confrontation underscores the growing tension between global social media platforms and national regulators seeking to enforce stronger safety standards, particularly concerning the protection of children and prevention of non-consensual intimate imagery.
