Switching the burden of online safety from users to platforms

Australia's proposed digital duty of care shifts responsibility for online safety from individuals to platforms. But legislation that calls for 'safe by design' social media raises questions about what that means in practice. An RMIT expert explains. 

Dr Senuri Wijenayake, Senior Lecturer and ARC DECRA Fellow, School of Computing Technologies:

"Women and gender-diverse people bear the brunt of online abuse, yet they are rarely involved in designing the tools meant to protect them.

"In a study led by RMIT University, we worked with 75 Australian women and gender-diverse social media users, and 21 experts in platform safety and digital policy, to understand where existing safety features fall short and what genuinely safer platforms would look like.

"What we found was practical and specific.

• Abuse reports need context to be acted on effectively.
• Harmful content should be harder to share before it spreads.
• Account bans must be harder to evade without stripping away the anonymity that keeps vulnerable people safe.
• Automated moderation needs to detect culturally specific abuse, not just obvious violations.
• Platforms must recognise sustained harassment campaigns, not just isolated posts.
• Safety tools need to reach users before harm occurs, not after.

"Those most affected already have clear, practical ideas about what would make platforms safer. The opportunity now is to design with them - so safety is built in from the start, not bolted on as an afterthought."

Read more at The Conversation.

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