QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE
Ms WELLS (Lilley—Minister for Sport and Minister for Communications) (14:54): Thank you very much for the question. To the first part of the question, you'll have to wait 20 more hours until I introduce the legislation to the House tomorrow, but the exposure draft has been out for three weeks now in order to give everybody a chance to come prepared for the parliamentary debate.
I discussed sock puppets at this dispatch box in question time yesterday. Sock puppets, I think we're all aware, are used malevolently online by malevolent actors and therefore have a reputation, in some parts, that people are mistrustful of. That's an understandable position to have, but this isn't about that.
This is the fact that sock puppets exist and are used by malevolent actors already, and the eSafety commission and accredited researchers from Australian institutions—another word that might be less ominous is 'mystery shopper'—need to mystery shop what is happening on platforms in order to test whether platforms are actually doing what they say that they are doing.
If they say they are asking a 14-year-old for their age, we need to test if they are actually doing that. So the eSafety commission or accredited researchers create an account as a 14-year-old girl and test those hypotheses. They do it for good purpose.
Yesterday, the Butterfly Foundation came out and said we would not be where we are without the use of sock-puppet accounts by Australian accredited researchers, because it enabled us to test and demonstrate that, on Pinterest and on Reddit and on Meta and on Instagram, 14-year-old girls are being fed eating disorder content over and over again and, when these platforms are asked to take that material down, the percentages were like four per cent on X, nine per cent on Instagram and 25 per cent on Pinterest.
It's absolutely not good enough. They are not doing what they said that they would do. We have put that in the exposure draft and we intend to put that through the legislation because we think that we should be able to mark the tech platforms' homework.
They should not get to mark their own homework. That is the purpose of sock puppets. Accredited researchers currently live in Poland or Germany because, if they lived in their own country, they would be sued by the platforms.
There are no legal protections for them at the moment. That is why we seek to put that in a digital duty of care. The onus should be on the platforms to prevent harm online, not on individuals who have harm occur to them—and then for us to do an ambulance-at-the-bottom-of-a-cliff approach, which is what is currently happening.
It's really important work. I look forward to any amendments from you that you have to improve the bill when we introduce it tomorrow, but some of the miscommunication flying around online is not at all reflective of the earnest and sincere desire to keep Australian kids online through the very best methods available to us by some of the best Australian researchers who are heralded the world over and who currently face legal threats if they try and do that work on Australian shores.