Transparency is uncomfortable for big tech companies: eSafety Commissioner

Transparency is “very uncomfortable” for the big tech giants as they haven’t had to deliver it in a meaningful way, according to Julie Inman Grant, eSafety Commissioner.

This week, the eSafety Commission announced it was slapping Twitter/X with a $610,000 fine for anti-child abuse gaps.

Speaking at SXSW Sydney, Inman Grant acknowledged the commission’s actions against Twitter saying, transparency is very uncomfortable for these companies because they haven’t had to deliver it in a “meaningful” way and are not answering questions with datasets without qualifiers they want to provide.

When asking the tech companies questions about their transparency methods, Inman Grant said they weren’t straightforward.

“We had some of these companies leaving entire answers blank, questions like how many trust and safety people do you have at Twitter now that you've eviscerated your trust and safety teams? No answer,” she explained.

“Clearly, if you've got an HR payroll system, you know the answer, and why wouldn't you give an online safety regulator the information if you're doing the right thing if you have the people policies and processes in place and you're using the right technologies?”

She told SXSW Sydney that you cannot have accountability without transparency.

“What we are all saying is we haven’t seen that,” she said.

She compares having standards with the big tech companies to having standards in other industries.

“Just as car manufacturers were required to invent seatbelts 50 years ago, we have food safety standards and we've got surge protection on electrical goods. This technological exceptionalism shouldn't stand,” she said.

“They gave [the eSafety Commission] powers to legally compel transparency but it turns out this is a very labour-intensive process.”

Inman Grant said if they can build a sophisticated AI system and target advertising with deadly precision, they should be able to do the same with hate speech or no child sexual abuse material.

“But instead, what we're seeing is the companies are making it harder than making their platforms more opaque by putting the Twitter data firehose for instance, out of the reach of advocates, NGOs and small regulators,” she said.

She said this is one step in the direction towards transparency but one of the reasons why the commission is working with the European Commission.

“We started a global online safety regulators network so we can work with the UK, Ireland, Fiji, South Africa and Korea and all these other countries that are finally coming on board. It's taken eight years of a very lonely ride,” she said.