Internet safety watchdogs in Australia fined Elon Musk’s X A$610,500 ($386,000; £317,360) for not cooperating with an investigation into how they stop child abuse.
In a post in November, Mr. Musk said that “stopping child exploitation is priority #1.”
The company was criticized by the eSafety Commission for its “empty talk” about the problem.
After X laid off a lot of people, insiders told the BBC that they would not be able to protect users from trolling.
Since Mr. Musk bought X, which is also known as Twitter, for $44bn last year, its sales have been going down steadily.
Australian rules that went into effect in 2021 say that the government can fine internet companies if they don’t tell them about how they keep users safe online. The government can take the company to court if it doesn’t pay the fine.
Alphabet’s Google was also given a warning for not responding to its request for information about how it handles content that is harmful to children.
But X’s failure to follow the rules was worse. The government said the company “failed to provide any response to some questions, leaving some sections entirely blank.”
It said: “Twitter/X did not respond to a number of key questions including the time it takes the platform to respond to reports of child sexual exploitation; the measures it has in place to detect child sexual exploitation in livestreams; and the tools and technologies it uses to detect child sexual exploitation material” .
The company told the regulator that it had laid off 80% of its employees around the world. For example, there are no longer any public policy staff in Australia, where there were two before Mr. Musk took over.
Australian researchers said last month that X was wrong to turn off a tool that let users report false information about elections.
There was a big vote in Australia over the weekend to give Indigenous people more rights, and this move made people even more worried.
The BBC has asked X to say something.
