Public safety dashboards could boost social media platform accountability: Expert
PETALING JAYA: Social media platforms should no longer be allowed to quietly police child sexual abuse material (CSAM) behind closed doors, digital consumer experts said, urging greater transparency through public childsafety dashboards to show how such content is detected, removed and escalated.
However, they emphasised that any public disclosures must remain anonymous and limited to broad trends to avoid exposing victims or helping offenders circumvent detection systems.
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Malaysia Cyber Consumer Association president Sirajuddin Jalil said the proposal is a “good idea” and could serve as a form of risk mitigation for cyber consumers, particularly as online threats involving children become increasingly complex.
“The reality today is this: it is better to tell people than not to tell them. Every person has value, and when it touches family and children, the value becomes even bigger,” he told theSun.
He added that public dashboards would strengthen platform accountability, as most users are left in the dark about what happens after harmful content is reported.
“There is logic. There is relevance. The dashboard proposal could be put forward so that the accountability of social media platforms becomes clearer.
“When they take down content, we do not see the takedown action. The people who submitted the report may see the action, but others do not,” he said.
He said platforms should publish visible moderation data, including the volume of CSAM-related content removed, whether takedowns were initiated proactively by platforms or through public reports, and how frequently such material was detected.
He also said platform-specific disclosures would be more meaningful than broad official takedown figures, which often combine CSAM with political, racial, religious and other harmful content categories.
“If the platform itself has accountability and responsibility towards protecting users, then it could show transparency in its process of removing content, especially CSAM-related content.
“For example, it could show the number of such content items removed daily. The public could then use that as a process to increase awareness,” he said.
Sirajuddin said the CSAM threat landscape is evolving rapidly with artificial intelligence, as abusive material could now be generated without children directly sharing explicit content.
“The major threat of CSAM is digital material or content, either shared by victims or created by perpetrators, or predators.
“Does the perpetrator convince or groom children to give content? Or could the content simply be created using AI tools? That is the question,” he added.
On May 18, after officiating at the World Telecommunication and Information Society Day celebration and the Girls in ICT programme, Communications Deputy Minister Teo Nie Ching said the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission was finalising a safety code to curb CSAM under the Online Safety Act 2025, with implementation targeted for June.
Citing police statistics, Teo said Malaysia recorded 152 CSAM cases last year, while 100 cases were reported this year as of the date of her statement, adding that the figures could be only “the tip of the iceberg”.
Meanwhile, Communications and Multimedia Content Forum of Malaysia CEO Mediha Mahmood said public child-safety transparency dashboards are worth exploring, but cautioned against reducing the issue to simplistic public case counters.
“For child safety, greater transparency is good in terms of us knowing whether platforms are detecting harmful content, whether they are acting quickly enough, how they are dealing with repeat offenders and whether they are escalating serious cases appropriately.
“However, I would be cautious about immediately treating a full public dashboard as the starting point,” she told theSun.
Mediha said a layered transparency model would be safer, with regulators receiving sufficient detail to assess compliance, law enforcement accessing case-level information where necessary, and the public being given only general, non-identifying data.
“The important thing is to avoid two extremes. I understand we don’t want to be given vague corporate reporting that simply says platforms take safety seriously.
“But we also should not require public disclosures that may expose victims, compromise investigations or worse, help offenders understand how detection systems work,” she added.
