SYDNEY — Australia’s internet watchdog has said the world’s biggest social media firms are still “turning a blind eye” to online child sex abuse material on their platforms, and said YouTube in particular had been unresponsive to its enquiries.

In a report released on Wednesday, the eSafety Commissioner said YouTube, along with Apple, failed to track the number of user reports it received of child sex abuse appearing on their platforms and also could not say how long it took them to respond to such reports.

The Australian government decided last week to include YouTube in its world-first social media ban for teenagers, following eSafety’s advice to overturn its planned exemption for the Alphabet-owned Google’s video-sharing site.

“When left to their own devices, these companies aren’t prioritizing the protection of children and are seemingly turning a blind eye to crimes occurring on their services,” eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said in a statement.

“No other consumer-facing industry would be given the license to operate by enabling such heinous crimes against children on their premises, or services.”

A Google spokesperson said “eSafety’s comments are rooted in reporting metrics, not online safety performance,” adding that YouTube’s systems proactively removed over 99% of all abuse content before being flagged or viewed.

“Our focus remains on outcomes and detecting and removing (child sexual exploitation and abuse) on YouTube,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

Meta — owner of Facebook, Instagram and Threads, three of the biggest platforms with more than 3 billion users worldwide — has said it prohibits graphic videos.

The eSafety Commissioner, an office set up to protect internet users, has mandated Apple, Discord, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Skype, Snap and WhatsApp to report on the measures they take to address child exploitation and abuse material in Australia.

The report on their responses so far found a “range of safety deficiencies on their services which increases the risk that child sexual exploitation and abuse material and activity appear on the services.”

Safety gaps included failures to detect and prevent livestreaming of the material or block links to known child abuse material, as well as inadequate reporting mechanisms.

It said platforms were also not using “hash-matching” technology on all parts of their services to identify images of child sexual abuse by checking them against a database. Google has said before that its anti-abuse measures include hash-matching technology and artificial intelligence.

The Australian regulator said some providers had not made improvements to address these safety gaps on their services despite it putting them on notice in previous years.

“In the case of Apple services and Google’s YouTube, they didn’t even answer our questions about how many user reports they received about child sexual abuse on their services or details of how many trust and safety personnel Apple and Google have on-staff,” Inman Grant said. — Reuters

WASHINGTON — The catastrophic implosion of the Titan submersible that killed five people in 2023 could have been prevented, a US Coast Guard investigative board found on Tuesday, calling the vessel’s safety culture and operational practices “critically flawed.”

The Titan vanished during a descent to the Titanic wreck on a tourist expedition, losing contact with its support ship.

After a tense four-day search, its shattered remains were discovered strewn across the seabed 1,600 feet (488 meters) from the bow of the legendary ocean liner that sank in 1912, claiming more than 1,500 lives.

OceanGate, the US-based company that managed the tourist submersible, suspended all operations after the incident.

A company spokesperson said on Tuesday the company again offered its deepest condolences to the families of those who died “and directed its resources fully towards cooperating with the Coast Guard’s inquiry through its completion.”

The chair of the US Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation, Jason Neubauer, said the accident was preventable.

“There is a need for stronger oversight and clear options for operators who are exploring new concepts outside of the existing regulatory framework,” he said in a statement with the release of the 300-page report.

Chloe Nargeolet, whose father, French oceanographer Paul-Henri Nargeolet, died on the submersible, said she was satisfied with the investigation.

“The OceanGate boss didn’t do his job properly and obviously my father didn’t know any of that,” she said. “It was not random or bad luck, it came from something. It could have been avoided.”

The board determined that the primary contributing factors were OceanGate’s “inadequate design, certification, maintenance and inspection process for the Titan.”

It also cited “a toxic workplace culture at OceanGate,” an inadequate regulatory framework for submersibles and other novel vessels, and an ineffective whistleblower process.

The report added “for several years preceding the incident, OceanGate leveraged intimidation tactics, allowances for scientific operations, and the company’s favorable reputation to evade regulatory scrutiny.”

The board found that OceanGate failed to investigate and address known hull anomalies following its 2022 Titanic expedition. It said data from Titan’s realtime monitoring system should have been analyzed and acted on during that expedition.

It also criticized OceanGate for failing to properly store the Titan before the 2023 Titanic expedition.

The report faulted the absence of a timely Occupational Safety and Health Administration investigation into a 2018 OceanGate whistleblower’s complaint combined with a lack of government cooperation, calling them a missed opportunity and added “early intervention may have resulted in OceanGate pursuing regulatory compliance or abandoning their plans.” — Reuters