Sexual extortion report finds gaps on major platforms
Sexual extortion complaints to eSafety topped 2,000 between 1st July and 31st December 2025, with young men aged 18 to 24 the most affected.
The figures sit alongside a new eSafety transparency review of Apple, Discord, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Snap and WhatsApp, which found gaps in how major platforms detect and respond to child sexual exploitation, abuse and sexual extortion.
A joint eSafety and Australian Institute of Criminology research project published last year, surveying nearly 2,000 young people aged 16 to 18, found more than one in 10 adolescents (11.3%) had been victims of sexual extortion. Of those, 57.7% experienced it before the age of 16.
The review found some services, including WhatsApp, iMessage, Discord and Google Messages, lacked clear and accessible ways for users to report sexual extortion or child abuse, or did not provide dedicated reporting categories for those harms.
Platform detection gaps persist
Responses from the companies also showed uneven use of available technology, including language analysis that can identify coercion scripts used by sexual extortion offenders. ESafety said detecting harm remained difficult in private messaging and video environments, where sexual extortion and livestreamed sexual abuse often occur.
ESafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said, “We’re deeply concerned about the devastating impacts of sexual extortion, which not only target vulnerable individuals but also have profound psychological and emotional consequences for victims and their families.”
The review said only Microsoft is using tools to detect and disrupt live online child sexual abuse in video calls. It also found persistent gaps in detecting newly created child sexual abuse material, with several providers still not using tools to identify previously unseen images and videos across all parts of their services.
Inman Grant said, “This report shows that platforms could and should be doing a lot more to prevent these harms and there are simple steps they can take today to protect users.”
ESafety said some providers had made incremental changes since earlier reporting periods, including Google and Snap taking extra steps to proactively detect known child sexual exploitation and abuse material, Meta using new tools to detect grooming, and Discord blocking URLs to known child sexual exploitation and abuse material.
If intimate content is shared online, eSafety said Australians can report it at www.esafety.gov.au/report, where it says it has a 98% success rate in getting the material taken down.
