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Interview with Neil Mitchell on 3AW Melbourne
NEIL MITCHELL:
Today I mentioned I found a pile of offensive Facebook pages, one targeting the police in a very nasty way, advocating assaults on women – there are all sorts of nasty anti-Islamic stuff out there. One of the areas that worries me about cyberspace is the unaccountability of the organisations, like Facebook, that allow this stuff. And then there’s bullying, cyber bullying. We’ve seen that leading to suicides. Are your kids victims of cyber bullying, internet bullying, Facebook bullying; are you, for that matter? I reckon we get an email a day with complaints about a Facebook page. Anti-trolling legislation will be introduced into the parliament today which at last will make someone accountable for what is happening here. We’ll get some advice on it later from our psychologist, Michael Carr-Gregg, but on the line, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Communications, Paul Fletcher. Good morning.
PAUL FLETCHER:
G’day Neil.
NEIL MITCHELL:
What about these Facebook pages first? When will they be made accountable for some of the disgraceful stuff that they allow to be published?
PAUL FLETCHER:
Well the Bill that’s being introduced into the parliament today, the Enhancing Online Safety for Children Bill, targets specifically cyber bullying material, harmful cyber bullying material, targeted at an Australian child. So if a child is a victim of cyber bullying material, what they’ll need to do under these new arrangements is, first of all, complain to the service in the normal way, but then, if there’s no response within the specified time, which can be as short as 48 hours, depending on what the commissioner determines, then they can take the complaint to the Children’s e-Safety Commissioner, and if the commissioner decides it is cyber bullying material, he or she will have the power to issue a notice against the large social media service, requiring that the harmful cyber bullying material targeted at an Australian child be removed. The commissioner will also have the power to issue a notice against the person who posted the material, requiring that it be removed. So there’s a couple of tools that the commissioner will have under this Bill being introduced by the Abbott government today.
NEIL MITCHELL:
And ultimately what’s the penalty if they don’t go along with it?
PAUL FLETCHER:
Well in terms of the large social media services, if they receive a notice and don’t respond to it, then ultimately under this Bill, they’re exposed to a fine, which is up to $17,000 for each day that they don’t respond to the notice.
NEIL MITCHELL:
Will this cover Twitter?
PAUL FLETCHER:
The precise list of which services will be so called large social media services is going to be determined by the children’s e-safety commissioner. The criteria in the bill, what it says is essentially it depends in the number of user account in Australia. The large social media services will be the ones that are covered, the final determination of which ones will be made by the commissioner, but obviously I guess we all know which the big ones are.
NEIL MITCHELL:
What are they? Facebook, what else?
PAUL FLETCHER:
Well certainly Facebook is one of the big ones, Twitter is a large one as well, and there’s a range of others. It’ll be an issue for the commissioner to work through and decide which services are large social media services. They’ll be declared as such and if they’re in that category and there is harmful cyber bullying material targeted at an Australian child then there’s the capacity under the legislation to issue this notice.
NEIL MITCHELL:
Twitter and bullying seem to go hand in glove, it’s common. I cop a lot of it myself but I’m not a child. How do we define bullying?
PAUL FLETCHER:
There is a fairly detailed definition in the legislation of cyber bullying. There’s a list of factors, things like serious harassment, serious intimidation, that kind of thing. This is very much a set of measures aimed at protecting the safety of children online. Look, the internet and social media is a great forum for social interaction, and in the main it’s a very good thing, but a percentage of human interaction, whether online and offline, goes bad. At the moment when it goes bad online it can be very hard to get something done about it. You can report it to the major services but if they don’t do anything it’s pretty unclear what you do next. Now it’ll be clear if you’re a child who’s been exposed to cyber bulling you’ll now have the option of going to the children’s e-safety commissioner, and this is going to be a body within the federal government that will take the lead on online safety issues.
NEIL MITCHELL:
And are you going in the future to look at some of these offensive pages that they refuse to be accountable for.
PAUL FLETCHER:
Well the question will be whether the page is targeted at an Australian child.
NEIL MITCHELL:
But they wouldn’t necessarily be I don’t think. But this is another area; some are quite disgraceful, not pornographic, but disgraceful, offensive, racist.
PAUL FLETCHER:
And certainly those issues are raised with me as a politician and many of my political colleagues, there’s obviously a balance to be struck here between free speech on one hand and content on the other. What we’ve chosen to do here is have a particular measure designed to protect children against the threat of cyber bullying.
NEIL MITCHELL:
Okay, I understand. Thank you very much for your time, Paul Fletcher, Parliamentary Secretary for Communications. Have you ever had any dealings with Facebook? Good luck.
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