Australia eSafety report finds Big Tech gaps on child sexual extortion

Australia's online safety regulator has found significant gaps in how major technology platforms address child sexual exploitation and online sexual extortion. The eSafety Commissioner reported more than 2,000 complaints of sexual extortion between July and December 2025 Source: CNA, thenextweb, theguardian, with young men aged 18–24 the most affected demographic.

What the report found

• Platforms are not using available language analysis to detect known coercion scripts used by offenders Source: thenextweb, theguardian. The same coercive phrases appear across thousands of approaches.
• Reporting tools are inadequate: services like WhatsApp, iMessage, Discord, and Google Messages lack clear ways to report sexual extortion or child abuse Source: thenextweb, CNA.
• Technology to detect livestreamed abuse exists but is not consistently deployed; Microsoft was the only company reporting use of both language analysis and proactive detection for live streams Source: theguardian.

What platforms are (not) doing

While some improvements were noted — Google and Snap take steps to detect known child sexual abuse material, Discord blocks links to abuse content, and Meta introduced grooming detection tools Source: thenetweb, CNA — eSafety says responses remain inadequate. Commissioner Julie Inman Grant stated: “Even when we’ve laid this out, we haven’t seen adequate responses, despite the technology being readily available” Source: thenextweb, CNA, theguardian.