Australia slaps Elon Musk’s X with a hefty fine for not doing enough to stop child abuse content

In a significant development, an Australian regulatory authority has imposed a substantial fine of A$610,500 (equivalent to $386,000) upon X, the social media platform helmed by Elon Musk.

This penalty was imposed due to the platform’s failure to cooperate with an investigation concerning its anti-child abuse practices. The regulatory action comes as a setback to X, a company that has grappled with challenges related to retaining advertisers, amidst allegations of inadequate content moderation.

Specifically, the e-Safety Commission issued this fine to X, the platform formerly known as Twitter after its rebranding by Elon Musk. The penalty was enacted due to X’s lack of responsiveness to inquiries made by the regulatory body.

These inquiries encompassed crucial aspects such as the platform’s response times to reports of child abuse material, as well as the methodologies employed for its detection.

The fine is a reputational hit for a company that has seen a continuous revenue decline as advertisers cut spending on a platform that has stopped most content moderation and reinstated thousands of banned accounts.

Most recently the EU said it was investigating X for potential violation of its new tech rules after the platform was accused of failing to rein in disinformation in relation to Hamas’s attack on Israel.

“If you’ve got answers to questions, if you’re actually putting people, processes and technology in place to tackle illegal content at scale, and globally, and if it’s your stated priority, it’s pretty easy to say,” Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said in an interview.

“The only reason I can see to fail to answer important questions about illegal content and conduct happening on platforms would be if you don’t have answers,” added Inman Grant, who was a public policy director for X until 2016.

X closed its Australian office after Musk’s buyout, so there was no local representative to respond to Reuters. A request for comment sent to the San Francisco-based company’s media email address was not immediately answered.

Under Australian laws that took effect in 2021, the regulator can compel internet companies to give information about their online safety practices or face a fine. If X refuses to pay the fine, the regulator can pursue the company in court, Grant said.

After taking the company private, Musk said in a post that “removing child exploitation is priority #1”. But the Australian regulator said that when it asked X how it prevented child grooming on the platform, X responded that it was “not a service used by large numbers of young people”.

X told the regulator available anti-grooming technology was “not of sufficient capability or accuracy to be deployed on Twitter”.

Inman Grant said the commission also issued a warning to Alphabet’s  Google for noncompliance with its request for information about the handling of child abuse content, calling the search engine giant’s responses to some questions “generic”. Google said it had cooperated with the regulator and was disappointed by the warning.

“We remain committed to these efforts and collaborating constructively and in good faith with the e-Safety Commissioner, government and industry on the shared goal of keeping Australians safer online,” said Google’s director of government affairs and public policy for Australia, Lucinda Longcroft.

X’s noncompliance was more serious, the regulator said, including failure to answer questions about how long it took to respond to reports of child abuse, steps it took to detect child abuse in live streams and its numbers of content moderation, safety and public policy staff.

The company confirmed to the regulator that it had cut 80 per cent of its workforce globally and has no public policy staff in Australia, compared to two before Musk’s takeover.

X told the regulator its proactive detection of child abuse material in public posts dropped after Musk took the company private.

The company told the regulator it did not use tools to detect the material in private messages because “the technology is still in development”, the regulator said.

(With input from agencies)