Opinion: Social media hero-worship of delinquents must be squashed

A move to dim the bragging rights of brazen juveniles by forcing social media platforms to take action on posts depicting crime is welcome, but may prove as hard to police as our youth criminals, writes Kylie Lang.

If you shut down the social media posts of shameless young criminals – usually bragging about stealing some poor bugger’s car – you diminish their ability to boast.

The world isn’t watching. The world doesn’t care. And with that, boasting becomes pointless. Bad behaviour isn’t “liked” by random nobodies and delinquent gangs.

Younger children aren’t able to see what older kids, to whom they naturally look for guidance or validation, are framing as a glamorous lifestyle. No hero worship.

As the Queensland government finally takes some kind of action against youth crime – fuelled by public fury and our daily newspapers’ Enough is Enough campaign – it is good to see a move to dim the bragging rights of brazen juveniles.

A private member’s bill, by Liberal Groom MP Garth Hamilton, seeks to give Australia’s eSafety Commissioner wider powers to issue social media companies with take-down notices on content depicting criminal activity.

Member for Groom, Garth Hamilton. Picture: Nev Madsen.

Images and videos of kids in stolen cars and otherwise behaving like lawless grubs should never be uploaded in the first place.

But social media is a free-for-all, where anything goes.

Mr Hamilton says his proposal will go further than laws passed by the Coalition government in 2021 – which gave the eSafety Commissioner authority to compel social media giants to remove harmful content, including depictions of abuse or “sextortion” within 24-hours of receiving a formal notice.

“Youth crime is fully the responsibility of state governments … but this is something that the federal government can do to make life harder for these criminals who are terrorising towns like mine in Toowoomba,” he said.

Mr Hamilton – whose constituents are rightly fed up with rampant youth crime – said under the bill, when social media posts displayed or promoted criminal activity they could be reported and the eSafety Commissioner a “conduit” for their removal.

“It’s hard enough going through the crime they have in the community without the perpetrators flaunting it online afterwards,” he said.

Able Smith Parade, Mount Isa, where young criminals perform burnouts in stolen cars. Picture: Liam Kidston.

As he notes, when good people see this offensive material online, they get the distinct (and correct) impression that perpetrators are “getting away with it”. And as I wrote in this column last Saturday, residents are already leaning towards vigilantism – so they don’t need any more encouragement to take matters into their own hands.

At a time when magistrates are shown up for being weak, and the government’s scrambling 10-point plan to target youth crime is branded a Band-Aid (and a flimsy home-brand one at that), more needs to be done to stop the aggrandisement by kids already laughing at the law.

Child and Family Wellbeing Association of Australia vice-president Deb Tsorbaris identifies a “huge opportunity” in providing the eSafety Commissioner with greater powers.

The trick will be seeing how effective these powers can be.

Social media companies – billion-dollar businesses with an eye on profit – have been exposed countless times for giving lip service to ethics.

Harmful posts remain live or are quickly reinstated, and the promised crackdown on “hate speech” hasn’t worked.

Centre for excellence in child and family welfare CEO, Deb Tsorbaris. Picture: NCA NewsWire/ Luis Ascui

As a national eSafety survey reveals, seven in 10 Australians believe online hate speech is spreading, and most think more should be done by social media companies.

Just this week eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant issued five companies with demands to explain their practices to avoid child sexual exploitation material being shared – with a 35-day deadline to respond or risk daily fines of up to $700,000.

But as Ms Inman Grant notes, past bids to extract any information have been fraught.

Benoit Leclerc is a professor of criminology and criminal justice at Griffith University and no stranger to the difficulties of getting social media companies on board.

He has collaborated with the Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation to combat child sexual exploitation online, but tells me social media organisations are “not designed to collaborate with law enforcement agencies”.

“To be realistic, I think it’s very difficult for social media platforms to remove images – obviously it takes resources so there is a lot of work to be done from their end,” Prof Leclerc says.

“If they are not collaborating with the authorities they should do something within their organisation such as set up teams of people to work on these aspects (of removing criminal and child exploitation material).”

When I ask Prof Leclerc how likely this might be, his response is “who knows?”

“But education and awareness is a starting point,” he says, “and the more push there is in the media, you have to think that at some point somebody will do something.

“We have to make them start to care.”

Kylie Lang is associate editor of the courier-mail