Australian court fines X for failing to disclose child safety details

An Australian court ordered X Corp. to pay AU$650,000 after finding the company failed to fully answer a transparency notice about how it handled child sexual exploitation content, a penalty that is modest for a major social-media company but significant for regulators trying to force cooperation.

The Federal Court of Australia also ordered X to pay AU$100,000 of eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant’s costs within 45 days. The ruling followed a dispute that began with a notice issued on February 22, 2023 under Australia’s Online Safety Act 2021, when the platform was still Twitter, Inc. Twitter merged into X Corp. in March 2023, and the report covered steps taken between January 24, 2022 and January 31, 2023, with a deadline of March 29, 2023.

Justice Michael Wheelahan ruled on October 4, 2024 that X was required to respond to the notice. The Full Federal Court later rejected X’s appeal on July 31, 2025, leaving the company with costs at each stage before the May 2026 penalty decision. X had argued it did not have to answer the regulator’s questions, but the court ultimately sided with eSafety and ended a three-year dispute.

The case matters well beyond the dollar figure. eSafety said its transparency framework is part of the Basic Online Safety Expectations, a core enforcement tool under the Online Safety Act, and that the February 2023 notices also went to Discord, Google, TikTok and Twitch. The regulator said those notices were designed to measure how major platforms detect and address child sexual exploitation and abuse material, including grooming, livestreaming and sexual extortion.

eSafety has said it had already handled more than 76,000 investigations concerning child sexual exploitation material since 2017, underscoring the scale of the harm and the pressure on platforms to explain what they are doing. For Australian regulators, the ruling reinforces the idea that global companies cannot treat local safety inquiries as optional. For X and other U.S.-based tech firms operating abroad, it signals that refusal to disclose moderation practices can bring legal, financial and reputational consequences long after the original request is filed.

The broader precedent is what stands out: governments are increasingly willing to compel answers from dominant platforms, and when those platforms resist, even a relatively small fine can carry outsized weight in the global crackdown on platform accountability.