Social media firms advance NZ's controversial 'world first' code of conduct

Thursday, 30 March 2023

Governance arrangements for the Code of Practice for Online Safety and Harm were agreed on Monday.

A controversial New Zealand code of conduct that has been billed as a “world first” attempt by social media firms to combat a wide range of online harms is starting to click into place, administrator NZTech says.

The Aotearoa Code of Practice for Online Safety and Harms was brokered in July by cyber-safety organisation Netsafe and supported by Meta, Google, TikTok, Amazon and Twitter.

They claimed it was a step forward in tackling a range of problems from misinformation to cyber-bullying and illegal content.

However, the initiative continues to be criticised by several organisations as a weak attempt by the technology giants to pre-empt regulation.

* Social media giants agree to 'first of its kind' code of conduct in Aotearoa

Just as social media was used to disrupt elections, we should expect the same and worse from AI, researcher Paul Duignan says.

* Government and NZTech step up urgency of ambitions for technology sector

NZTech chief executive Graeme Muller said the social media firms reached an agreement on the governance arrangements for the code on Monday.

Consultant and former Māori Party candidate Carrie Stoddart-Smith had been appointed as the initiative’s executive director, he said.

About half of the positions on a proposed oversight committee that would monitor compliance with the code had now been filled, and Muller expected the full committee would be in place within weeks.

The founding members needed to be approved by the social media firms through a process of consensus, but the committee would later be able to appoint its own members, he said.

The code sets out 45 measures in very general terms that the companies can take to reduce various online harms, but lets them choose which are relevant to their business and has no penalties for non-compliance beyond potential suspension from the code.

The five social media firms submitted “baseline” reports in December setting out what activities they were doing or had planned in the areas covered by code, and are due to submit their first “annual transparency reports” in July.

InternetNZ chief executive Vivien Maidaborn said better systems were needed to keep people safe online, but remained wary of the initiative.

Inclusive Aotearoa founder Anjum Rahman fears government work in the area has been put on ice.

“We know from conversations with other civil society organisations in Aotearoa that there are shared concerns about how this code was drafted and how well it will work,” she said.

“The code has been designed by online services and there’s no mention of the specific challenges our communities face online, or how the signatories of the code will address them. It's also unclear if there will be any local expertise and community voices on the oversight board,” she said.

Mandy Henk, chief executive of fellow non-profit advocacy group Tohatoha NZ, said she remained of the view that NZTech lacked the “legitimacy and community accountability” to administer a code of that nature.

“NZTech is undeniably an industry body” and this should not be an industry code, she said.

“Our view is that the self-regulation contained within the code just isn’t credible and it doesn't provide for any kind of independent oversight of the signatories.”

Anjum Rahman, founder of Inclusive Aotearoa, said it was problematic for people to be “shoulder-tapped” to sit on the code’s oversight committee as that was not a transparent process and they could lack independence.

In many cases, the code was less stringent than the community standards the social media platforms had individually adopted “so I’m struggling to understand what it will add”, she said.

“It doesn't seem to me that they've addressed in the code, the power differential between vulnerable communities that are often targeted by online hate, and very well-resourced companies and platforms.”

Despite the criticisms, Muller said the code did create an environment that would allow the signatories to be held to account.

The initiative was not about avoiding government regulation, as most regulation tended to include at least a degree of self-regulation, he said.

The code would hold services accountable for meeting “what they currently say they're going to do”, rather than provide a mechanism for people to complain about specific pieces of online content, he said.

“If you start with an axe hanging over someone's neck, they're not going to even get involved.

“What we've got to do is get the thing going and get it built in a very professional way, and then with the right oversight committee that starts to bring the trust,” he said.

Henk said Tohatoha NZ would prefer a fresh start.

“We don't have a lot of confidence that the Government is going to release anything. In the absence of that, what we would ultimately like to see is the code itself fixed to provide real oversight and real accountability.”

The Government kicked off a review of content regulation last year, saying the evolution of digital media and the rise of new content platforms had resulted in a significant increase in the potential for New Zealanders to be exposed to harmful content.

Rahman said she understood a draft report was completed in September.

However, ministers are not currently expected to consider officials’ “final draft proposals” and go back out to public consultations until the second half of this year.

Rahman said she was concerned that work had been sidelined. A lot of people had made submissions that contributed to the draft report and the Government owed it to those people and others to release that, she said.