Australia fines Elon Musk's X platform $528,000 over anti-child abuse gaps

SYDNEY – An Australian regulator has fined Mr Elon Musk’s social media platform A$610,500 (S$528,000) for failing to cooperate with an investigation into anti-child abuse practices, a blow to a company that has struggled to keep advertisers amid complaints that it is going soft on moderating content.

The e-Safety Commission said X, the platform Mr Musk rebranded from Twitter, failed to answer questions, including how long it took to respond to reports of child abuse material posted on the platform and the methods it used to detect it.

Though small compared with the

US$44 billion (S$60.2 billion) Mr Musk paid for the website

in October 2022, the fine is a reputational hit for a firm 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 European Union 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’ 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 the commissioner, who was a public policy director for Twitter until 2016.

X closed its Australian office after Mr Musk’s buyout, so there was no local representative to respond to Reuters. A request for comment sent to the San Francisco-based firm’s media e-mail 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, Ms Inman Grant said.

After taking the company private, Mr Musk wrote 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 that available anti-grooming technology was “not of sufficient capability or accuracy to be deployed on Twitter”.

Ms Inman Grant said the commission also issued a warning to Alphabet’s Google for non-compliance with its request for information about 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, Ms Lucinda Longcroft.

X’s non-compliance 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 with two before Mr Musk’s takeover.

X told the regulator its proactive detection of child abuse material in public posts dropped after Mr 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. REUTERS