Australia’s internet safety regulator has declared that major technology companies — including Apple, Meta, and Google — have “significant gaps” in how they handle child sexual abuse and the rising threat of online sexual extortion, according to a report released Tuesday.
The country’s online safety watchdog, eSafety, said in a new transparency report that digital platforms are not deploying existing tools capable of identifying well-known manipulation scripts used by sexual extortion criminals.
eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant did not mince words about the lack of action. “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,” she said. “Even when we’ve laid this out, we haven’t seen adequate responses, despite the technology being readily available.”
Google, Meta, Snap, Microsoft, and Apple did not respond to requests for comment.
The report arrives on the heels of legislation introduced in June that would give eSafety greater authority to take tech companies to court for failing to follow Australia’s ban on social media use by children under 16. Australia made history as the first nation to enact such a ban, and countries including Britain and several European nations are now pursuing similar policies.
Australia has also been scrutinizing the safety of children on chat and gaming platforms. Back in April, eSafety asked certain online gaming companies to explain how they shield children from grooming by sexual predators.
In 2024, eSafety directed eight technology platforms to submit reports every six months detailing their compliance with Australia’s “Basic Online Safety Expectations” — rules focused on detecting and preventing child sexual exploitation and abuse.
This latest release is the third in a planned four-part series and centers on sexual extortion — a form of online blackmail in which perpetrators share or threaten to share intimate material unless victims meet their demands.
The first report in the series set a baseline for comparison, while the second raised red flags about companies’ failure to proactively identify abusive content.
Between July and December 2025, eSafety received more than 2,000 complaints related to sexual extortion, with young men between the ages of 18 and 24 being the most frequently targeted group. A separate eSafety study conducted last year found that more than one in ten teenagers aged 16 to 18 had experienced sexual extortion, and more than half of those victims were first targeted before they turned 16.
Investigators found that the same criminal tactics kept appearing across multiple extortion cases, yet companies consistently failed to catch them. The report stated that “responses from the companies show there are serious gaps in the use of available technologies like language analysis that can identify well-known coercion scripts used by sexual extortion offenders.”
The report also flagged problems with reporting tools: “Gaps in reporting tools also persist across services like WhatsApp, iMessage, Discord and Google Messages, with some services lacking clear, accessible ways for users to report sexual extortion or child abuse or failing to provide dedicated reporting categories for these harms.”
Additionally, the regulator noted that technology already exists to better detect livestreamed child sexual abuse, but it is not being consistently put to use.
Some progress was acknowledged. Google and Snap have taken steps to proactively identify known child sexual abuse material, Discord has begun blocking links to abusive content, Meta has introduced new tools to detect grooming behavior, and Microsoft has started detecting live abuse during video calls.
