We call them “social media”, but one of their main lines of business is social misery. We’re talking about the most nauseating crimes imaginable, enabled by the world’s biggest tech companies, on a scale never seen in human history.
And the big internet companies seem pretty content with the situation. How else to explain what Australia’s e-Safety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, reports?
Illustration: Andrew Dyson. Credit:
It’d be bad enough that the big internet firms are not even doing “the bare minimum” to protect our societies from the mass-scale paedophilia and terrorist incitement flourishing on their sites, as the commissioner puts it. But it’s worse: “In fact, we see that they are moving backwards from where they were in the early 2000s,” says Inman Grant.
Exhibit A is a scanning product developed for detecting known images of sexual abuse of children, Photo DNA. Developed by Microsoft in 2009, it’s long-established and highly effective.
“If you look in 2022,” Inman Grant tells me, “the global information and communications industry was worth $US5.3 trillion and in the US alone there were 600,000 companies. Now Photo DNA has its 15th anniversary and Microsoft still licenses it. How many companies do you think are likely using Photo DNA right now? Two hundred.”
The commissioner says that even the company that created it, Microsoft, “is not using it on OneDrive,” the company’s online cloud storage system. “They’re using no detection technology on Skype, which is the primary vector for livestreaming child sexual abuse. They’re not applying it on Teams or Xbox.”
Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant.Credit: Edwina Pickles
The commissioner says that Google is no better: “They’ve developed some really cutting-edge technology called CSAI Match which helps detect child sexual abuse on videos.”
So the company created just the tool it needs. But guess what? “They’re not using it on Google Meets, they’re not using it on Gmail, they’re not using it on most of their primary services. So if you’re developing these technologies and you’re not even using them yourself, then you’re not really doing the bare minimum to prevent your platforms and technologies from being weaponised.”
The world’s biggest tech firms are enabling the most nauseating crimes imaginable
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18.03.2024
We call them “social media”, but one of their main lines of business is social misery. We’re talking about the most nauseating crimes imaginable, enabled by the world’s biggest tech companies, on a scale never seen in human history.
And the big internet companies seem pretty content with the situation. How else to explain what Australia’s e-Safety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, reports?
Illustration: Andrew Dyson. Credit:
It’d be bad enough that the big internet firms are not even doing “the bare minimum” to protect our societies from the........
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