Government instructs web users to 'not feed the trolls', following scandals involving the defacement of Facebook pages. An 'Online Ombudsman' is proposed. This raises the question of whether and how Government is able to intervene in online forums. In these cases, no law has been broken, just moral codes.
The shocking vandalism of tribute Facebook pages for slain Australian children could have been avoided if only users, not Facebook, put more effort into policing the site, the internet industry says.
The incidents led Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to say he was considering appointing an online ombudsman to deal with social networking issues.
"The overriding view is that users are not utilising the safety tools that these sites provide, and that was in large part the cause of these recent problems," he said in an interview.
"All of the social networking sites need to make safety a stronger and clearer priority than it is and that includes more adequate resourcing," said Nockles, who is now a cyber safety consultant and vice-president of global net safety group I-SAFE.