Finding better ways to protect our people from online harm

Wednesday, 3 June 2026

Anjum Rahman is project founder with Tāhono Trust, which works to connect and empower communities. Tāhono has partnered with Amnesty International to push for technology companies to be held accountable for online harm, through a campaign called No Harmware.

OPINION: That there is harm being caused by technology platforms is not in dispute. There is plenty of evidence available relating to the range of harms, including scams, fraud, sexual exploitation, stalking and harassment, misuse of data, death and rape threats, child sexual abuse and grooming, as well as being contributory factors to mass violence and death.

The solutions we have in our country are largely based on individual reporting of harm. Which means the individual needs to see the material, report it, then go through whatever hoops are needed to get justice.

Remedies and justice depend on the resources available to enforcement bodies, the overloaded schedules of our court systems, and the ability to even gain access to the perpetrator who may well be situated overseas. The remedies are often not timely – the damage has already been done and possibly gone viral. All that is left is a potential for accountability and redress if the legal process has worked and the perpetrator has any funds.

The platforms on which this harm is occurring have largely been exempt from accountability. Safe harbour provisions in the Harmful Digital Communications Act ensure that they can not be held accountable for what someone else posts on their platform.

Read more:

• Why the people who could easily fix social media’s harm to kids won’t

• Age-ban on social media can’t solve mental distress on its own

• How a law to stop cyberbullying can be used as a tool to silence

For such provisions to work platforms are required to have a valid complaints process. Due to the massive volume of traffic on large platforms, they have chosen to automate a lot of the process around complaints, prevention of uploading illegal content and taking down posts or accounts. Users can ask for a review of the automated decisions. However, the larger companies have laid off high numbers of their trust and safety staff, meaning a huge decrease in effectiveness in preventing harm.

With the wide range of harms affecting many people, some of them incredibly vulnerable, it is not enough to have systems requiring people to act after the harm has happened. It isn’t fair for regulatory processes to put the burden on victims.

Many of these harms are exacerbated by platform design, lack of effective monitoring, lack of investment into the complaints process, failure to identify illegal and harmful content, and inadequate systems which incorrectly remove or shadow-ban content that is legal.

They aren’t dealing adequately with malicious reporting of content or social media accounts, or targeted harassment campaigns. The regulatory systems cannot work through a “one law to fix them all” approach. A single piece of legislation isn’t going to provide detailed rules for all of the varied problems we are seeing in online spaces.

One of the recommendations from the international experts on our #NoHarmware webinar was to have specific provisions for each harm. This would ensure that free speech and a range of other human rights are protected.

We can do this by developing industry codes in collaboration with the communities who are impacted by harms, civil society organisations and the private sector, including but not limited to tech platforms.

It requires enforcement that acts as a deterrent. Fines and other remedies must be at a level that have impact but are proportionate to the size of the platform and the level of harm. We do not want to stifle innovation in the tech sector.

Combined with this regulatory system, we require adequate resourcing to educate all of our people on existing and emerging technologies. We require a robust monitoring process that acts as a check on the independent regulator and the legal framework, and a complaints process if the regulator gets it wrong. We require independent researchers who have access to the relevant data held by platforms. And we require a human rights-based approach – for example, see the concerns raised in this Amnesty report regarding AI.

This is complex work that will take time, resource and due consideration. We understand the power of large multi-national corporations: their ability to lobby decision-makers, the resources available to them to wield considerable influence online and offline.

The responsibility of our government is to protect our people. Our investment in a regulatory framework addressing the broad range of issues will reduce costs from the justice system and social support systems, improve public trust and wellbeing, and produce safer, less-divided communities.

In all of this, let us be guided by the whakatauki: he aha te mea nui o te ao? He tangata, he tangata, he tangata. What is the most important thing in the world? It is people, it is people, it is people.