A senate inquiry into child exploitation was told on Friday plans to make Facebook messages encrypted would create an "ideal environment" for online child abuse.

Online child abuse has exploded over the past two decades, and spiked throughout the COVID-19 pandemic as abusers and victims spent more time in the digital world.

Law enforcement has complained the plan would prevent them accessing message from paedophiles to their victims, but Meta - Facebook's parent company - insisted it was redoubling its efforts to combat abuse while balancing user privacy.

Meta's global drector of safety, Antigone Davis, said while messaging would be encrypted, online abusers often left "crumbs" for law enforcement on parts of the site which remained open.

"You may see people who have this kind of interest [make] sexualised comments under [pictures of] minors ... There are opportunities to actually use those breadcrumbs," she said.

Meta reported over 21,000 incidents of child exploitation between July 2020 and June 2021, and Ms Davis said the company would invest $6.6 billion into online safety in 2021.

That included strengthening default privacy settings for children, initial harm prevention, and artificial intelligence to track potential abusers on the public side of its platform.

But William Stoltz from the ANU's National Security College said Meta's AI had proven to only uncover 0.6 per cent of violent material on its platform.

"If you getting end-to-end encryption comes at the cost of a child being, let's be brutally honest, raped and tortured in extreme instances, do you really think that's a fair exchange?" he told the committee.

"I would hope Australians would say that's certainly not a Faustian bargain worth engaging in."

Dr Stoltz said Meta's plan would allow a predator to "seamlessly" transition a child to a secret messaging service, having engaged them on a public platform.

Combined with ephemeral messaging - which deletes messages after they are opened - Dr Stoltz warned of an "incredibly pernicious" environment for police.

"The ability for those messages to be automatically destroyed, it's destroying evidence," he said.

"So these three things together, to be brutally honest, is ... creating an ideal environment for those people trying to groom children."

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Dr Stoltz called for a range of reforms enabling the government to intervene if it believed Meta was not doing enough to crack down on online child sexual abuse.

"It's really important that we set the precedent that businesses that become as ubiquitous and engrained into how our society functions can't expect to go unregulated," he said.

His proposal included Facebook being registered as a carriage service provider, giving the Home Affairs Minister the power to prevent end-to-end encryption if it was found to be endangering children.

Meta would also be required to report annually to the e-Safety Commissioner on its efforts to counter abuse material.

"We're kind of taking their word that they are committed ... It's about bringing them to the table on that commitment," he said.

The Australian Federal Police has criticised the proposal, warning countries in south-east Asia were hotbeds of "pay-per-view" live online child sexual abuse.

"Countries in this region with high levels of poverty, high-speed internet connections, English language proficiency, and advanced remittance services leave facilitators well-positioned to profit from this abhorrent offending," it said.

A 2020 study showed 256 Australian-based offenders spending an average of $78 to access abuse live streams aired in the Philippines, over 2714 separate transactions between 2006 and 2018.

The AFP arrested 235 offenders on child sexual offences in 2020-21, up from 74 just two years earlier.

The US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received 9.6 million reports of child sexual abuse material in 2017, compared to 10,000 in 1998.

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