It’s Time We Set New Standards for How Tech Companies Tackle Online Child Abuse

Julie Inman Grant is Australia’s eSafety Commissioner. Shutterstock For decades, the tech industry argued that regulation of any sort would risk strangling innovation, and the best thing governments and regulators can do is stay out of the way.  While this might have sounded like a good idea at one point, the idea the online industry would and could regulate itself has proved – with hindsight – to be deeply flawed. It’s an ethos that has led to growing safety failures on multiple online fronts – most critically in the global battle to defeat the proliferation of online child sexual abuse material. Policymakers and regulators around the world are increasingly seeking to address this critical issue.   Two years ago, the Australian Parliament put in place tough new legislation that would task the online industry in Australia with drafting mandatory and enforceable codes. In keeping with Australia’s established co-regulatory approach to industry compliance, the codes would remove any doubt or perceived “grey areas“ around what the community expects of all online platforms when it comes to dealing with the worst-of-the-worst content on the internet. The codes would operate under Australia’s new Online Safety Act, cover eight major sectors of the online industry and have global implications for how some of the largest and wealthiest companies in human history tackle this issue. Most importantly, the new laws empowered eSafety to step in with compulsory standards if draft codes were not found to provide appropriate community safeguards.  Earlier this year, eSafety found that six…It’s Time We Set New Standards for How Tech Companies Tackle Online Child Abuse