Australia eSafety Commissioner launches safety-by-design campaign to combat sextortion on platforms

On June 3, 2026, Australia's eSafety Commissioner launched a campaign and issued guidance on safety-by-design obligations for platforms addressing sextortion. The Commissioner indicated that the campaign was informed by an increase in reports, signalling a regulatory expectation that platforms embed protections against coercion, exploitation and extortion into their design and operation rather than relying on retrospective user reports or manual moderation after harm has occurred.

Regulatory guidance that requires platforms to design out sextortion risk creates demand for detection systems that operate upstream of harm. Guardii, a world-leading AI online-safety platform and Meta Business Partner, fulfils that safety-by-design mandate by monitoring direct-message conversations in real time for the behavioural signatures of sextortion, including rapid escalation from casual contact to requests for intimate content, threats conditioned on payment or compliance, and language signalling acute distress or suicide risk. The system blocks or flags hostile contact before it reaches the child, surfaces a victim in crisis to an adult with duty of care, and provides platforms with structured evidence of coercion that satisfies regulatory reporting obligations under Australian law, all without handing human moderators or parents a feed of private messages, addressing both the harm and the privacy considerations that regulators balance in safety-by-design frameworks.