eSafety says 2,000 sextortion complaints expose platform gaps

Australia’s online safety regulator says Meta, Apple and Google still have serious blind spots in how they detect sextortion, after more than 2,000 complaints reached the eSafety Commissioner in six months. The watchdog says the cases show familiar abuse tactics moving across mainstream digital services, with safeguards too often kicking in only after victims report the threat.

The warning is landing hardest on young men aged 18 to 24, a group not usually centred in public discussion of image-based abuse. For digital platforms, that shifts the issue from a niche moderation queue to a product and detection problem. Services built for fast messaging, image sharing and account switching can also help offenders escalate quickly.

The eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, said major companies were still missing known warning signs after the regulator had pointed to available technical fixes. The Guardian reported that Instagram and WhatsApp alone drew more than 1,300 complaints.

That concentration puts the problem on a small group of consumer platforms, not on obscure corners of the internet.

In remarks carried by ABC News, Inman Grant said the regulator had already shown companies where the failures sit.

“Even when we’ve laid this out, we haven’t seen adequate responses, despite the technology being readily available.”

• Julie Inman Grant, via ABC News

One screenshot cited by the regulator carried the line “I have everything to ruin your life”. It is a blunt example of how the abuse can pivot from sexual coercion to blackmail in a few messages. eSafety’s point is that those moves are patterned enough to be detected earlier than they often are now.

Her criticism goes beyond moderation after the fact. The regulator’s case is that companies still rely too heavily on user complaints, weak detection systems and inconsistent safeguards, even though sextortion often follows repeatable steps: contact on a mainstream service, intimate material obtained or fabricated, then pressure once the offender thinks the victim can be isolated or shamed. eSafety is treating that as a safety-by-design failure, not only a bad-actor problem.

The Australian policy angle is clear. Meta, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Snap and Discord have all been drawn into eSafety’s broader transparency work on how their services handle online harm. Messaging and social products remain central to how abuse spreads. Canberra has already pressed platforms over child safety, scam prevention and age-appropriate design; sextortion is becoming another test of whether global tech groups build protections early or wait for regulators to force them in.

The 18-to-24 skew pushes the issue beyond the familiar child-safety frame. The regulator is still warning about harm to children, but the complaint data also suggests adult users on large mainstream apps are being hit at scale. That raises a narrower product question: are risk systems tuned to the people most likely to be targeted?

A second comment from Inman Grant, reported by the Guardian, made the same point in design terms. She said offenders were exploiting platform gaps, weak detection systems and inconsistent safeguards as they moved between services and escalated harm against children.

eSafety has paired the findings with a public warning campaign aimed at younger users. Its message to industry is broader than an awareness push. If the same scripts are still surfacing after thousands of complaints, the watchdog is signalling that platforms can no longer treat sextortion as something users should detect and report on their own. For Meta, Apple and Google, the pressure now sits on proving their systems can spot known patterns before a threat reaches blackmail.