Australia’s internet regulator, eSafety, has found significant gaps in Big Tech companies’ response to online child sexual abuse and extortion. The regulator’s report noted that companies such as Apple, Meta, and Google are not using available technologies to identify and prevent child sexual exploitation.

Coercive Online Sexual Extortion

eSafety has been directing technology platforms to report on their compliance with Australia’s online safety rules, focusing on detecting and preventing child sexual exploitation and abuse. The latest report highlights the issue of sexual extortion, where perpetrators share or threaten to share intimate material unless their victims comply with their demands.

The regulator received over 2,000 complaints about sexual extortion between July and December 2025, with young men aged 18 to 24 being the most affected. An eSafety study found that more than one in 10 teenagers aged 16-18 had been victims of sexual extortion, with more than half being targeted before they were 16.

eSafety investigators found that the same tactics were used in multiple sexual extortion scams, but companies failed to detect them. The report noted that there are serious gaps in the use of available technologies, such as language analysis, to identify well-known coercion scripts used by sexual extortion offenders.

Some improvements were noted, including Google and Snap taking steps to proactively detect known child sexual abuse material, Discord blocking links to abuse content, Meta using new tools to detect grooming, and Microsoft detecting live abuse in video calls.

Original reporting: Appleton, WI News Feed (HLL/CB) — read the source article.