Australia’s social media inquiry hands down recommendations

Strategies to keep children safer online and holding big tech companies to account are just two of the recommendations from the social media inquiry into online harm.

With serious levels of online harm across Australia, a social media inquiry has called on big tech giants to enforce their own safety standards while keeping youths safer.

The Select Committee on Social Media and Online Safety, chaired by Robertson federal Liberal MP Lucy Wicks handed down its 26 recommendations on Wednesday.

Some of these include establishing a digital safety review, addressing online abuse for family and domestic violence, holding big tech giants more accountable for enforcing safety standards and more education on the issue.

Greater safety measures have been recommended for youths under 18.

The inquiry calls for big tech giants to enforce their safety standards.

They also recommended mandating that all social media companies set the highest privacy settings as a default for people under the age of 18.

The committee found that the safety of people online is being threatened and the harm for victims of online abuse leaves a long trail of trauma and suffering.

The inquiry heard from around 60 witnesses including TV personality Erin Molan who had suffered horrific online abuse including death threats again her unborn child.

Ms Wicks, who recently spoke to the Express about her horrific abuse at the hands of online attackers, said the recommendations were an important next step in making our online world safer.

Robertson federal Liberal MP Lucy Wicks chaired the inquiry. Picture: Annika Enderborg

During the Inquiry she questioned big tech giants including Meta (Facebook) and YouTube about their content policies versus the people who speak up about getting content removed. She said the two were “worlds apart”.

“The Australian Government is leading the world in online safety, but technology and online predators evolve quickly, so the Government must continue to hold social media companies to account and support victims of abuse,” she said.

“For too long social media platforms have been able to ‘set the rules’, enabling the proliferation of online abuse. The balance of responsibility for the safety of users online, which until recently has been primarily on users, must be ‘flipped’ to ensure that social media platforms bear more of the burden of providing safety for their users.”

Member for Gellibrand Tim Watts was deputy chair of the inquiry. Picture: Erik Anderson

She said social media companies have to take responsibility to enforce their terms of service.

The inquiry will request the eSafety Commissioner examine the extent to which social media companies enforce their policies in relation to harm and how they are working to reduce it.

The committee’s Labor MPs Tim Watts, who was deputy chair of the committee, and Sharon Claydon have added extra comments stating that “the era of effective self-regulation by these platforms failed to deliver a safe online environment for Australians”.

“All sides of politics are united in the need for government regulation to underpin the safety of these platforms, particularly for vulnerable groups,” they wrote in the report.

They have added extra recommendations including asking social media platforms set public benchmarks for their fact checking and misinformation processes in relation to the 2022 Federal Election.
They also called for the Australian online safety framework to be updated and for eSafety to review its arrangements with police forces to prevent further cases from “falling through the cracks”.