Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman-Grant.Credit:Rhett Wyman
Inman Grant,a former Twitter executive,said that she hopes Australia’s industry standards would be the “first domino” of similar regulations globally to help tackle harmful content.
She said the requirements would not force tech companies to break their own end-to-end encryption,which is turned on by default on some services,including WhatsApp.
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All major tech platforms have policies that ban child sex abuse material from their public services,but Inman Grant said they have not done enough to police their own platforms.
“We understand issues around technical feasibility,and we’re not asking them to do anything that is technically infeasible.”
“But we’re also saying that you’re not absolved of the moral and legal responsibility to just turn off the lights or shut the door and pretend this horrific abuse isn’t happening on your platforms.
“What we’ve found working with WhatsApp,it’s an end-to-end encrypted service,but they pick up on a range of behavioural signals that they’ve developed over time,and they can scan non-encrypted parts of the services,including profile and group chat names,and things like cheese pizza emojis,which is known to stand for child pornography.”