A new ‘anti-troll' law in Australia will hold social media platforms liable for hurtful comments on their websites.
The law will define the social media companies such as Facebook and Instagram as the publisher of the comments which will allow them to be targeted for defamation claims.
If a claim goes to court, the platform will be required to ‘unmask’ a troll - providing an email address, phone number or relevant personal detail. But critics question whether the changes will help curb rates of online bullying.
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Jennifer Beckett, lecturer in media and communications at the University of Melbourne, tells Kathryn Ryan it’s another step towards trying to define social media companies as publishers in order to force accountability for what ends up on the platform.
“It also enables us to look at a lot of other stuff that’s going on on those platforms as well. It’s part of a broader push to see those tech platforms taking a lot more responsibility, but it’s also a first step in looking at how they might be broken up.
“Once we start to define them as publishers, they’re going to have to think about how they operate and it’s putting a crack in their armour as it were. It’s going to enable people to start thinking more effectively about how that might work.”
She says there’s a distinction between trolling and defamation, while trolling can contain some defamation, most acts of trolling are a separate thing.
“I think there’s an issue with the way we use the word ‘trolling’, particularly in the media it’s become catch-all for everything from rick rolling all the way to very serious cases of harassment and online stalking and defamation is kind of in that mix. It’s a problem we need to address in the way we talk about these kinds of behaviours.”
Suing Facebook or Twitter is a daunting thought for any regular person, but the Australian federal government has said it would bankroll the case if one was taken as they look for a test case in court. The catch is that the victim and perpetrator would both need to be Australian citizens.
And anyone committed enough to trolling could easily hide behind a VPN so that it appears to Facebook that it’s not an Australian account.
“We already have a lot of legislation in place that can do a lot of this work, I do not understand why you would want to put this legislation in place except for the fact that it is going to force social media companies to collect an awful lot more data on the identity of Australians with social media accounts.
“That was something the government wanted to do earlier on this year and it was met with so much criticism that they walked back on it. My concern here is that this is really an attempt by stealth to those social media ID laws requiring social media companies to gather that information on anyone and then say, it wasn’t us, it was the social media companies.”
One of the recommendations in the scrapped law is that Australians provide ID to open social media accounts, which would be retroactive for people already on social media. Under the new legislation the processes will be in the hands of social media companies to enforce.
“Effectively you’re handing over your driver’s license and a bunch of other IDs to social media companies to hold so they know exactly who you are. That’s problematic on levels of privacy, it’s problematic on levels of data protection. If they get hacked, what are they going to do with all that data? That’s a real concern. Aside from that, ending online anonymity is not going to end trolling.”