Australia’s online safety regulator released a transparency report showing more than 2,000 sexual extortion complaints between July and December 2025, with Instagram and WhatsApp together named in over 1,300 cases.

The eSafety Commissioner finds major platforms have significant gaps in monitoring that allow sexual extortion to thrive, especially targeting young men in Australia.

In the second half of last year, eSafety logged 2,206 extortion complaints, about 85% from men and the largest group aged 18 to 24, with more than one in ten adolescents affected and over half of victims under 16.

University of Sydney academic Dr. Joanne Gray criticized the sector for reactive approaches and urged embedding safeguards into platform design, including moderation to prevent risky features when live streaming cannot be made safe.

Despite available technologies like language analysis and detection tools, most platforms aren’t using them effectively; Microsoft was the only company reported to deploy both approaches.

eSafety highlights persistent safety gaps in detection and prevention, noting limited use of language analysis and scarce proactive detection in live streaming and video calls, with Microsoft as the sole entrant using both technologies.

eSafety recommends concrete improvements: text analysis to recognize extortion scripts, monitoring for suspicious behavior such as sudden geographic shifts, frictionless in-app reporting, and on-device abuse detection on encrypted platforms that preserves privacy.

Related coverage touches on Europe considering age-based social media restrictions and ongoing debates about AI image tools by Meta affecting user consent and safety.

The regulator emphasizes that platforms could implement these improvements immediately and urges tech companies to prioritize prevention of online sexual exploitation due to broad harms.

Experts criticize platforms for reactive enforcement and call for stronger legislation to hold companies accountable and better safeguard children online.

The report points to systemic gaps like clunky reporting tools, missing extortion categories, and misleading forms; offenders move from public apps to encrypted channels to avoid exposure, relying on scripts detectable by language analysis.

Victim messages include coercive lines like “I have everything to ruin your life” and “only money can help you now to end this peacefully,” illustrating the pressure tactics used.