{"id":47197,"date":"2025-08-06T06:41:15","date_gmt":"2025-08-06T06:41:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/47197\/"},"modified":"2025-08-06T06:41:15","modified_gmt":"2025-08-06T06:41:15","slug":"australia-regulator-says-youtube-others-turning-a-blind-eye-to-child-abuse-material","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/47197\/","title":{"rendered":"Australia regulator says YouTube, others ‘turning a blind eye’ to child abuse material"},"content":{"rendered":"

People walk by a YouTube logo, as Google celebrates the 20th anniversary of first video uploaded to YouTube, at the company’s corporate headquarters in San Bruno, California, on April 23, 2025. (PHOTO \/ AFP)<\/p>\n

SYDNEY – Australia\u2019s internet watchdog has said the world\u2019s biggest social media firms are still \u201cturning a blind eye\u201d to online child sex abuse material on their platforms, and said YouTube in particular had been unresponsive to its enquiries.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 video-sharing site.<\/p>\n

ALSO READ: YouTube to be included in Australia\u2019s teen social media ban<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cWhen left to their own devices, these companies aren\u2019t prioritising the protection of children and are seemingly turning a blind eye to crimes occurring on their services,\u201d eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said in a statement.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo other consumer-facing industry would be given the licence to operate by enabling such heinous crimes against children on their premises, or services.\u201d<\/p>\n

Google has said previously that abuse material has no place on its platforms and that it uses a range of industry-standard techniques to identify and remove such material. Meta – owner of Facebook, Instagram and Threads, three of the biggest platforms with more than 3 billion users worldwide – says it prohibits graphic videos.<\/p>\n

The eSafety Commissioner, an office set up to protect internet users, has mandated Apple, Discord, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Skype, Snap and WhatsApp to report on the measures they take to address child exploitation and abuse material in Australia.<\/p>\n

The report on their responses so far found a \u201crange of safety deficiencies on their services which increases the risk that child sexual exploitation and abuse material and activity appear on the services\u201d.<\/p>\n

Safety gaps included failures to detect and prevent livestreaming of the material or block links to known child abuse material, as well as inadequate reporting mechanisms.<\/p>\n

READ MORE: Google threatens legal action if YouTube included in Australia’s social media ban<\/a><\/p>\n

It said platforms were also not using \u201chash-matching\u201d technology on all parts of their services to identify images of child sexual abuse by checking them against a database. Google has said before that its anti-abuse measures include hash-matching technology and artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the case of Apple services and Google\u2019s YouTube, they didn\u2019t 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,\u201d Inman Grant said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"People walk by a YouTube logo, as Google celebrates the 20th anniversary of first video uploaded to YouTube,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":47198,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[64,63,13876,113,105,3973],"class_list":["post-47197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-child-abuse","tag-google","tag-technology","tag-youtube"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47197"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47197\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}