Australia's eSafety Commissioner issued its first formal notice on 15 August 2024 against an unnamed social media service for failing to remove child sexual abuse material within the 24-hour deadline set by the Online Safety Act, marking the regulator's first use of its enforcement powers since the legislation came into force in January 2022. The Commissioner warned that persistent non-compliance may result in civil penalties of up to 700,000 Australian dollars per day and emphasized that platforms must deploy proactive detection to identify and remove illegal content at scale, not only respond to user reports.
Proactive detection begins before material is published or a complaint is filed. As a Meta Business Partner, Guardii deploys CSAM detection—including recognition of AI-generated and deepfake abuse imagery—within the direct-message layer across Instagram, Discord, Snapchat and Roblox, intercepting illegal uploads in real time and flagging them for immediate escalation to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the Australian Federal Police or the appropriate authority, closing the window between production and harm that reactive takedown processes leave open.
