Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 21 July 2021

Joint Committee on Tourism, Culture, Arts, Sport And Media

General Scheme of the Online Safety and Media Regulation Bill: Discussion (Resumed)

Ms Julie Inman Grant:

I was only going to say that we have had an online content scheme in place for more than 20 years. We, as the eSafety Commissioner, have only been established for six of those. As a result, less than 1% of the content that we deal with is actually hosted in Australia. It is almost all hosted overseas. It depends on the regulatory scheme. For instance, with the image-based abuse scheme, we have had what I would regard as a relatively high degree of success, in terms of getting intimate images and videos taken down from overseas sites. There are thousands of different sites, and we have about an 85% success rate. It helps to have the government crest behind us, as well as a strong set of remedial actions and powers to hold either perpetrators or the platforms to account. There tends to be image chan boards and rogue porn sites that are hosted in permissive environments that are not likely to take that content down. One of the newer forms does make it clear, in our new Bill, that our laws and regulatory schemes will have extra-territorial reach.

Comments

No comments

Log in or join to post a public comment.