Paul Fletcher MP speaks to Miranda Devine on 2GB about cyber bullying

Host: There’s good news for parents worried about their children being bullied online. Parliamentary secretary for communications Paul Fletcher has revealed the government’s new cyber bullying laws which he has designed and they will put social media giants like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram on sort of a monitoring plan which will be the first plan on cracking down on online trolling, and I am glad to say that Paul Fletcher is on the line. Good evening.

Paul: Hello Miranda.

Host: So just in a nutshell, tell us how this system will work from a parent’s point of view.

Paul: Well we took a policy to the 2013 election to enhance online safety for the children, and one of the key elements of it was that we said that we will have a complaints system backed by legislation to get harmful material targeted at Australian children down fast from large social media sites.

And so what we’re targeting here is cyberbullying material and the idea is that we’re going to establish what we call the “Office of the Children's E-safety Commissioner” and if you as a child under 18 have been the subject of online bullying then you can make a complaint. The system will be that you first must make a complaint to the site, such as large social media sites such as Facebook, using their existing processes but if you don’t get a response then you can go to the children’s e-safety commissioner and then the commissioner will make the complaint on your behalf, and the legislation will set out the process for doing that and we’ve got what we call a two-tier approach.

So initially it will be on a cooperative basis for the large social media sites, there will be no legal obligation to comply with the notice but then what we set in the legislation is that if they repeatedly fail to respond to a notice, then they can be moved to what we call tier 2 where there will be a legal obligation to take down this cyberbullying material targeted at an Australian child on a large social media site. So that’s the essence of the legislative scheme that we’re working on and we’re aiming to have the legislation ready to introduce to parliament before the end of the year.

Host: And so have you been discussing with Facebook and Instagram and have they been cooperative?

Paul: Look we’ve had extensive discussions with the large social media services, Facebook, Google, which operates Youtube and other services and I do want to acknowledge that the large social media services put significant resources into cyberbullying and other kinds of material and they all have complaint schemes. That being said we did a lot of consultation with opposition and we can continue that consultation and that suggests that in many cases when a child is cyberbullied and they want to make a complaint to a parent or another adult wants to make a complaint on their behalf it can be very hard to get the response you’re looking for which overwhelmingly is that children want this harmful material taken down.

Now we had some extensive research done for us by the university of New South Wales social policy research centre as well as with some other Universities and they confirmed, that research confirmed a couple of things. Firstly one of the problems is that children feel that they’re being cyberbullied that they’re being humiliated in front of an audience because of the nature of social media but it also confirmed that one of the biggest issues that people face right now both children and parents on their behalf is social media sites and whether they’re sufficiently responsible so that’s why we want to have this legislative framework which will certainly be working cooperatively with the large social media services and I want to acknowledge they have worked with us cooperatively but it will be backed by legislation.

Host: Well good work, that’s fantastic news for parents, thank you so much Paul Fletcher

Paul: Thanks Miranda, pleasure to be here. 

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