Google, Meta, TikTok and Twitter will appear at hearings looking into online safety matters with the House of Representatives Select Committee on social media and online safety.
The public hearings will take place on Thursday, January 20 and Friday, January 2022.
Committee Chair Lucy Wicks MP said the hearings will allow the Committee to scrutinise the social media and technology industry’s response to online harms and abuse faced by everyday Australians.
“The Committee’s early hearings received powerful evidence from people who have experienced different types of online harm, and in these hearings the Committee can examine how the industry intends to move forward and protect its users,” she said.
Stakeholders from the technology sector will also appear, including Digital Industry Group (DIGI), Reset Australia and the Centre for Digital Wellbeing.
The Committee will also hear evidence from academics and researchers, mental health organisations and government agencies.
Further hearings by the Committee will be held in the coming weeks.
The Committee is reviewing evidence received from the community in addition to evidence gathered in the public hearings.
The Committee anticipates tabling its final report in the Parliament by 15 February 2022.
This comes after the News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code – also known as the Media Code laws – were brought in by the government to force Google and Facebook to pay Australian news companies for any content featured on their platforms.
Google went as far as to threaten to pull out of the country completely in January, while in February Facebook briefly pulled all of its news content in Australia.
After a lengthy process, the senate presented its report and into the laws, and Google launched its News Showcase product to comply with them. From there, major media platforms began making deals with Google and Facebook.
Google put forward the Google News Showcase – a program run by the platform which would operate under the code.
The platform displays news to users using a sliding panel that users can scroll through to access articles, and has recently added a panel to highlight top articles from news sources that a user chooses. This panel, called the “For You Feed”, will give a user updates on local, national, and international news from any outlet that they manually follow.
Since last year Google News Showcase has entered partnerships with major networks such as Seven West Media, Junkee Media, News Corp, Nine Entertainment, Yahoo and industry body Commercial Radio Australia.
The ABC also announced an additional 50-plus journalist roles in regional locations as a result of deals struck with Facebook and Google.