Australia’s online safety regulator has accused Apple and Google of financial motives in deciding not to remove Reddit and Elon Musk’s X from their app stores for hosting pornography in violation of their own policies.
Research cited in the eSafety commissioner’s online roadmap for age verification technology for adult sites last year reported that 41% of teens aged between 16 and 18 reported seeing pornography on X – more than the 37% who viewed pornography on dedicated adult sites.
Although Google and Apple have policies in their terms of service banning apps containing adult content, X and Reddit remain available on both companies’ app stores.
The eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, told Senate estimates on Thursday that a French trial of age verification technology on global porn sites had “created so much friction that French users just went to sites like X Corp … or on Reddit because [it] has porn all over it”.
Asked what was being done to make app stores take action on apps with pornographic material, Inman Grant said the companies were not currently enforcing their own policies.
“There’s a huge disincentive right now for the app stores to actually follow their own [policies],” she said.
“They collect a 30% tithe from every transaction that happens on a social media site … Think about the force multiplier of deplatforming an app and what that would mean to their revenue.”
Google Play charges a 15% fee for the first US$1m earned by developers each year, increasing to 30% above that. Developers making Apple apps pay 15% if the revenue generated the previous year is lower than $1m, or 30% if they earn more than that.
Guardian Australia has sought comment from Apple, Google, X and Reddit. X and Reddit are free apps in both stores, but users can pay for a subscription or premium service through the apps which would attract the app store fees.
Under Apple’s developer guidelines, apps with user-generated, primarily pornographic content may be removed, but apps with user-generated adult content hidden by default may still be displayed. Both X and Reddit hide adult content by default.
Despite campaigns calling for age assurance technology trials to include social media for people under 16, the $6.5m trial of the technology announced in May’s budget by the federal government is unlikely to initially include social media sites, the Senate committee heard, with the initial focus to be on adult websites.
Bridget Gannon, the first assistant secretary for the online safety branch in the communications department, said the initial focus would be on online pornography and the effectiveness of technology to prevent people under 18 from accessing it.
There would be more consultation on what to do regarding social media, she said.
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“There’s wide agreement there should be age limits on social media [but] there are different views on what that age should be … we’ll be doing some consultation and research to really nail down what that age should be, and then trial the available technologies to assess their effectiveness,” she said.
Gannon said the trial would examine different technologies, how to manage other issues like privacy and security, and whether the intervention should be at the internet service provider level or the social media companies, or other type of services.
Gannon noted that in recent years there was an increasing reluctance for people to hand over identity information to companies, meaning they might seek to bypass any age assurance tech that uses ID.
“We will be working closely with industry as a whole but they won’t be undertaking the trial – we will be,” she said.
But the social media companies would be required to assure user ages, under codes developed under the Online Safety Act in parallel with the trial, Gannon said.
There is no date set on when the trial would end, but Gannon noted the trial was funded just for the 2024-2025 financial year. There was a risk if the technology was rushed out that it wouldn’t work, she said.
“There’s a risk that families and parents and carers have a false sense of security about the technologies that they have in place that they may place undue trust in a system thinking their children are being kept safe when actually their children can bypass it quite easily or it just doesn’t work.”