Big Tech can flag a conservative post for "hate speech" before you finish typing it, but Australia's online safety regulator just confirmed those same companies won't deploy existing technology to catch predators running the same extortion scripts against thousands of children.
The eSafety Commissioner's third transparency report, published Tuesday, found that Apple, Meta, Google, Snap, Microsoft, and Discord have "significant gaps" in detecting and preventing child sexual exploitation — even after regulators handed them the exact playbook of how criminals operate on their platforms.
This isn't a capability problem. It's a priority problem.
Sexual extortion offenders work from recognizable scripts — the same coercive phrases repeated across thousands of approaches. Language analysis technology that could flag these patterns exists today. The report says platforms simply aren't using it. Commissioner Julie Inman Grant didn't mince words: "In several cases, we have provided these platforms with evidence of how their services are being colonised by criminals to devastating impact, with clear guidance on how to stem the abuse. Even when we've laid this out, we haven't seen adequate responses, despite the technology being readily available."
The reporting tools themselves are part of the failure. Gaps persist across WhatsApp, iMessage, Discord, and Google Messages, with some services lacking any clear way to report sexual extortion or child abuse, and others offering no dedicated category for it. Technology to detect livestreamed abuse also exists but isn't consistently deployed.
The victims are real and numerous. The regulator received more than 2,000 complaints about sexual extortion between July and December 2025. The demographic hit hardest: young men aged 18 to 24. An eSafety study found more than one in 10 teenagers aged 16 to 18 had been victims of sexual extortion, and more than half of those were targeted before they turned 16.
To their credit, some companies have taken steps. Google and Snap are proactively detecting known child sexual abuse material, Discord has begun blocking links to such content, Meta has introduced grooming detection tools, and Microsoft is detecting live abuse in video calls. But these are piecemeal efforts against a systemic failure — after three rounds of reporting, the regulator is still saying it's not enough.
Reuters framed this as part of a "regulatory clash" between governments and tech giants. TNW emphasized the regulator's blunt frustration at being ignored. What neither outlet will say plainly: these companies assign armies of engineers to build content-moderation AI that polices political speech in real time, then claim catching child predators is just too hard.
Australia was the first country to impose a social media ban for under-16s, with Britain and European nations now following. Canberra introduced legislation in June that would roughly double maximum penalties for systemic breaches. But as TNW noted, the under-16 ban "is not going smoothly." In April, eSafety also pressed gaming platforms on child grooming — Roblox split its users into age-gated tiers only under pressure from child safety lawsuits.
The question isn't whether Big Tech can protect children. The Australian report proves the technology exists and the companies have been told exactly what to do. The question is why protecting kids from predators ranks below protecting the discourse from dissent.
