Australia’s new Bill would allow users to take trolls to court

The Australian government has tabled the Social Media (Anti-Troll) Bill, 2022 in its Parliament, with a central focus on allowing users facing harassment on social media platforms to take legal action against online offenders. While it does not lay down direct penalties that such offenders could face, it suggests a mechanism that holds social media platforms accountable for offensive posts.

According to the Bill, individuals and administrators of pages and social media groups would no longer be held directly accountable for offensive content posted by users. Instead, it seeks to classify the social media platforms as publishers, and have them hold accountability towards such content.

To this end, social media platforms may be required to establish a complaints redressal scheme. The latter will accept complaints from users against offensive comments that would be classified as “defamatory”. As part of this, the complainants could request for social media platforms to divulge personal information of offenders – which could then be used to pursue defamation lawsuits based on the offensive comments made.

Once such a complaint is received, the redressal arm of these platforms would be required to notify an accused user about it within 72 hours. The Bill states that as a safeguarding measure to prevent misuse of this faucet, such complaints from users would only be entertained if a user is found to have sufficient grounds for pursuing defamation action against online comments and posts.

Accused users would also be required to approve the request from social media platforms to share their private data with the complainant. Critiques of the Bill have stated that it fails to clearly address what constitutes a troll or harmful content on the internet.

In India, a similar regulatory mechanism was put in place with the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 in February last year. Among other things, the guidelines suggested that social media platforms, deemed as intermediaries, are required to appoint points of contact for grievance redressals, as well as being the contact point between a platform and the Indian government.