The online safety regulator says it has no Australian staff at Twitter that it can contact to take down child exploitation material, after mass firings by Twitter's CEO Elon Musk shut down the team.
The Office of the eSafety Commissioner has confirmed to a parliamentary committee that Twitter no longer has any Australian staff, a direct line the regulator said was vital to keeping children safe online.
"We share your concerns about the stripping out of Twitter's capacity to respond to child sexual exploitation, in particular. There are no Australian staff left here," the office's acting chief operating officer Toby Dagg said.
"The Australian complement was a really critical component of Twitter's safety apparatus as far as we were concerned."
Australian staff found they had been locked out of company systems in November last year, after Mr Musk flagged widespread cuts to Twitter.
The eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, has written to Mr Musk to express her concerns about how axing the Australian team has affected the ability to deal with child exploitation material on Twitter.
Following his takeover of the company, Mr Musk declared ridding the site of child abuse material "Priority #1".
A review by US outlet NBC News in January found that Twitter accounts trading and selling child abuse material had remained active for months using thinly veiled terms and hashtags, including some that began before Mr Musk's takeover.
Greens Senator David Shoebridge — who raised the issue during the inquiry — said it was "plain wrong" that tech platforms could fire local staff without repercussions.
"Given the proliferation of online exploitation material, it’s remarkable there are zero local staff to respond to complaints and no Australian office whose job it is to remove offensive or dangerous material," Senator Shoebridge said.
"Apart from Meta, big tech refused to even appear at the inquiry today, proving yet again they think they’re beyond the reach of the law."
The commissioner's office said it was not just the presence of a trust-and-safety team in Australia that made a difference, but also the ability for the regulator to contact them directly to raise problems.
Mr Dagg said the office had access to "regional" representatives, but that it was "not quite the same" as being able to pick up the phone to contact a safety team directly.
The committee also heard that it takes Microsoft an average of two days to respond to complaints about child exploitation material, such as live streams on Skype.
Regulator mulls mandatory code
Ms Inman Grant is considering whether to implement a mandatory code of conduct for social media companies after being granted the powers to do so by the federal government.
Last week, Ms Inman Grant told parliament she had rejected draft codes written by industry, saying they had insufficient community safety safeguards, a concern her office had raised with the industry several times.
The commissioner recently said social media companies were doing "shockingly little" to address child abuse material on their platforms.
Senator Shoebridge said the industry could not be relied on to regulate itself, and that government must intervene.
Mr Dagg said mandatory codes would unlikely be able to impose requirements on Twitter — or others — to provide local staff, although a mandatory code could require more commitment to detecting illegal material on social media sites.
