Australia’s online safety watchdog has welcomed moves by the world’s largest technology companies to create a framework for reporting on child sexual abuse material, but questioned whether they truly have the will to tackle the problem properly.

eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant warned the technology giants she will use new legal powers to demand the companies reveal what systems they are using to check if child sexual abuse is on their platforms and how long it has been online.

Speaking to The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age from an anti-abuse summit in Brussels, Inman Grant said a newly unveiled abuse reporting framework from the Tech Coalition, which sets out what kind of information firms should disclose, was a positive step.

“We’ve seen a lot of selective transparency in the past and you can’t have accountability if you don’t have full transparency,” Inman Grant said.

The new reporting framework is being unveiled on Thursday (AEST) at the WeProtect Global Alliance Summit in Brussels by the Tech Coalition, which counts Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Snap Inc, Twitter and TikTok among its members.

It suggests companies report on how much child sexual abuse material they have removed or blocked from their services, a breakdown of the format of the material and how long it took, among other metrics.

But the framework is voluntary and does not require companies to report using the same metrics, meaning firms can evade comparisons of their work.

The Tech Coalition’s executive director, Sean Litton, said the code was designed to be broad to work for companies with very different business models, whether a streaming service that had to take down live videos of abuse, a social network or a private messaging app.

“The challenge is that each platform operates differently,” Litton said. “They collect different information and different information is more relevant based on their platform and how it works and how children are engaged on that platform.”