In 2024, the Office of the eSafety Commissioner gave their first periodic notices on child sexual exploitation and abuse material and activity (CSEA) to eight online service providers: Apple, Discord, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Skype, Snap and WhatsApp.

These providers are required to respond to the questions in eSafety’s notice every six months commencing 15 June 2024 for a total period of 24 months. This report contains a summary of each of the providers' responses and shines a light on online industry action against child sexual exploitation and abuse.

Key findings

• Despite the availability of technology to help detect child sexual exploitation and abuse livestreaming or video calls, no providers were using it on all parts of their service(s).

• While most services were using tools to detect new CSEA, some were not.

• While most services provided user reporting options and stated they responded to user reports in a reasonable amount of time, there were some providers who took much longer.

• While most providers were using hash-matching on their services (other than end-to-end encrypted services or parts of services) not all services were using this tool.

• There are tools, such as language analysis tools, that services can use to detect sexual extortion and stop this criminal activity, but not all of them were using these tools and not all tools were calibrated to keep users of all ages safe.

Canberra: Office of the eSafety Commissioner, 2025. 156p.