Australian regulator fines Musk's X $386,000 for alleged failure to cooperate with anti-child-abuse investigation

A regulator in Australia has reportedly fined Elon Musk's X, formerly known as Twitter, a staggering $386,000 (A$610,500) for not cooperating with an anti-child-abuse probe. The development comes after some have speculated that the platform has experienced difficulty in keeping advertisers due to its refusal to over-moderate speech.

Reuters reported that the e-Safety Commission has slapped the social media company with the fine because it failed to answer integral questions about how long it took the platform to respond to reports of child abuse material appearing on the platform. The commission claimed Musk has also failed to produce information on how it plans to detect child abuse online moving forward.

While the fine itself will likely not do much, it comes after the European Union has also gone after the social media juggernaut for apparently refusing to moderate information concerning the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.

"If you've got answers to questions, if you're actually putting people, processes and technology in place to tackle illegal content at scale, and globally, and if it's your stated priority, it's pretty easy to say," Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said.

"The only reason I can see to fail to answer important questions about illegal content and conduct happening on platforms would be if you don't have answers," Grant said.

It is not clear why X has refused to answer questions about child abuse material on its platform. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported that when the commission asked X how it was working to prevent child grooming on the platform, the social media platform reportedly answered that it was "not a service used by large numbers of young people."

X went on to suggest that the available anti-grooming strategies used previously by Twitter were "not of sufficient capability or accuracy to be deployed ..."

X now has less than 30 days to pay the fine. The penalty could become more severe if the company refuses to pay, per ABC.

"If they don't pay the fine within 28 days, then we at eSafety can take them to a civil penalty proceeding, take them to court, and depending on what the court decides, the overall fine could be much higher — up to $780,000 per day from the time that they're found being out of compliance since March," Grant said.

In late 2022, Musk claimed that child grooming online was one of his primary concerns after taking over X. While X did remove some of the hashtags commonly used by those targeting children, it is unclear what else the company is doing to actively clamp down on online child abuse material.

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