Select Committee gets it right
Better Public Media welcomes the findings of the Education and Workforce Committee’s final report on the Inquiry into the harm young New Zealanders encounter online, and the roles that Government, business, and society should play in addressing those harms.
BPM broadly supports the report’s recommendations, particularly the need to address legislative gaps and overlaps, establish an independent regulator for online safety, strengthen platforms’ liability for online harm, regulate algorithms, and ban deepfake sexual imagery.
Although care must be taken to balance content moderation and restrictions with the protection of basic rights like freedom of expression, such regulatory measures should not be controversial in a democratic society that recognises the real harms that can result from online publication, as the report has made starkly clear.
BPM also supports the intent of the recommendation to introduce age restrictions for social media platforms, but considers that the efficacy of such measures needs to be carefully assessed- particularly in respect to the reliability and privacy issues arising from age verification systems.
But what took us so long? In 2022, the Safer Online Services and Media Platforms discussion paper set out a framework in which many of these objectives might have been pursued. The SOSMP proposals were proportionate, and relatively modest compared with the pattern of regulatory measures being implemented in other democracies in the UK, Europe and Australia.
The proposals were proportionate, far from radical, and the tech sector itself was broadly supportive of the framework but with the change of government, the incoming Minister of Internal Affairs, Brooke van Velden, summarily cancelled the SOSMP work programme.
The new report underlines the uncomfortable fact that in the coalition government’s third year, no significant progress on protecting young people from online harms has been made. It seems we are back to square one.
BPM agrees that regulating online media requires care to ensure proportionality to harms and caution to protect civil liberties. But ideological opposition to even the most modest proposals for platform regulation to protect online users from harms is surely no longer tenable as a policy position.
But the good news is that we do not need to start from scratch. The ground-work has already been done. BPM therefore recommends that the Department of Internal Affairs’ prematurely-abandoned Safer Online Services and Media Platforms Framework be dusted off and used as the basis for developing the judicious regulatory response the Work and Education Committee has called for.
Attributable to the Better Public Media Trust spokesperson, Peter Thompson
Contact: office@betterpublicmedia 0224259447
