Ms Julie Inman Grant:

We try to achieve as much as we can co-operatively and collaboratively. We are often surfacing things that are missed but there is no question that having a big stick we can wield means that they are more compliant and willing to work with us. That has changed with the spectre of having new powers. We have seen some of the platforms do less in the context of goodwill. When this legislation was conceived in 2015, social media was primarily the challenge but we know online harm happens on dating sites and online gaming platforms. There is a really broad ecosystem. The search engines have a role to play and we will have a function around linked deletion notices. The app stores have a role to play, particularly if they are hosting rogue apps that are harming citizens that are in violation of their terms of service.

We now will have the power to remove content more rapidly. The quicker we take down content, the more distress is relieved from the person. It was initially 48 hours, and is now down to 24. We have seen some cases where a major platform will take down content within 12 minutes. We had a lot of baulking on the part of the platforms but even since that time around the sudden content moderation that is happening, they are increasingly using artificial intelligence, AI, and other tools to surface and help with their moderation efforts. Therefore, that is possible.

We have a new set, of, I guess, a duty of care, called the basic online safety expectations that will be laid down through ministerial instrument and will be able to compel transparency reports. We can do periodic reports or ones around specific issues. For instance, if there is a big pile-on, a brigade or a volumetric attack, we can write to a platform and ask what signals was it seeing, how did it respond, and is it consistently and fairly enforcing its terms of service, and if it does not comply there are penalties.

I guess the big pièce de résistanceis the adult cyber abuse scheme. Within three months of expanding our remit from Children's eSafety Commissioner to eSafety Commissioner adult cyber abuse reports started exceeding youth-based cyberbullying. Of course, if you are indigenous, an Torres Strait Islander, you have different ethnicity, sexuality or gender, you are three times more likely to be targeted than a white male.