Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Environment and Water) Share this | Hansard source

The Criminal Code Amendment (Deepfake Sexual Material) Bill 2024 is a timely piece of legislation. The Albanese government will create a new criminal set of offences to ban the non-consensual sharing of deepfake pornography. Digitally created and altered sexually explicit material is a damaging form of abuse against women and girls that can inflict deep harm on victims. I say women and girls because overwhelmingly this material is created and used against women and girls, although some boys are also the victims of it. In fact, some of the apps that create this deepfake material won't work on male bodies; they only work on female bodies.

These reforms will make clear that those who share sexually explicit material without consent using technology like artificial intelligence will be subject to serious criminal penalties, as they should be. This includes material that's been created or altered using technology such as deepfakes. Sexually explicit deepfakes, created and shared without consent, are used deliberately to dehumanise and degrade others. They particularly target women and girls, and they can certainly perpetuate harmful gender stereotypes and drive gender based violence. When they are shared with others or posted online without the consent of the person depicted, it is a serious breach of that person's privacy, and it can have long-lasting harmful impacts on the subject. So I welcome this legislation. It's the work of a government that is looking at the issues that our society faces and addressing them in a swift and thorough way.

This legislation is designed to stem the flow of the particular harms that result from deepfake pornography, and it's very important that we act now. The world's changing, and the technology that's available to online actors is changing. We're in a very particular moment of history, before what I think will be a really massive change as AI becomes even more dominant and mainstream. The shift that we're talking about, with the massive upswing in the use of AI, is as profound as the shift that we saw in 2007 when the iPhone was introduced. But only now is the alarm beginning to be raised, in the last couple of years, about the huge impact that social media is having on our health, on our attention spans and, in particular, on the mental health of our children. The lag between the introduction of the iPhone, the widespread use of social media and the way that this government is beginning to address those harms shows how quickly our society can change—and not for the better—and how important it is that we tackle these problems now. We can't allow the new and additional problem of AI generated deepfake pornography to escape from us in the way that some of the worst elements of social media escaped from us.

This bill amends the Criminal Code Act 1995 to modernise and strengthen offences targeting the non-consensual sharing of sexually explicit material online. The new offences will have a maximum penalty of six years imprisonment for transmitting sexually explicit material without consent and seven years imprisonment for aggravated offences, including where the person created the material. These amendments are a high priority following the government's public commitments on 1 May 2024 to introduce a suite of measures to tackle online harms, particularly harms that target women and young girls, who are overwhelmingly the victims here. This is timely.

As I said a moment ago, we're at a moment in history where AI is about to massively take off in its influence in all elements of our lives, and I do think that, as a community, we are not even beginning to grapple with what some of those effects might be. We're perhaps just beginning to understand what the future looks like. We really do need to think about how we get the best out of artificial intelligence, how we use it for public good and human benefit. We need to give some thought to that now in these early stages in a way that we really didn't give consideration to the massive upswing in the use of social media a few years back. We allowed open slather in social media and we're constantly chasing the harmful impacts of that now, trying to, in some ways, put the genie back in the bottle.

For deepfake porn apps, essentially what you do is you feed a photo of a real person into the app, and it spits out a faked sexually explicit pornographic but ultra-realistic image of that person. In fact, one Spanish mother that was interviewed on this said, if she hadn't known the details of her daughter's body, she would have assumed that the image that was circulating in her small town of her 14-year-old daughter was a real image.

In her book, Time to Reboot: Feminism in the Algorithm Age, Canberra writer Carla Wilshire calls this an 'epidemic of non-consent'. The apps and fake images are being used very deliberately to bully, to harass and to cause immense distress to the, largely, young girls who are being pornified by their classmates—young girls, fellow students and sometimes teachers and other women that they come into contact with.

Parents who were interviewed by News Corp papers in May told horror stories about their children even taking their own lives after being bullied and threatened with these sorts of deepfake images. There are so many horror stories, including that of Tilly Rosewarne from Bathurst, who was bullied from grade 5 onwards but found that the bullying escalated beyond endurance when one kid faked a pornographic picture of her and put it on Snapchat. Tilly suicided. Bullying follows children home from school. They cannot escape because of the influence of social media in their lives, the fact that their phones are always in their pockets, and it becomes a million times more toxic and more powerful when you combine it with the technology that allows this sort of deepfake pornography. So we are acting with this legislation to ban the creation and nonconsensual distribution of deepfake pornography. These reforms will make it clear that those who seek to abuse or degrade people through doxing or deepfakes or abusing their privacy online will be subject to serious criminal penalties because what is happening to people online is having a real-world impact in our homes, in our schools, in our workplaces, in our community.

In the most recent budget we funded a rapid review of research into perpetrators that we expect will also look at the way perpetrators of violence are using social media and technology to continue their harassment and intimidation. Researchers in the area of domestic violence and sexual violence, Jess Hill and Michael Salter, are very explicit, too, about the connection between pornography and rising rates of violence against women. Professor Salter said last month, 'The technology sector is profiting from services and products that cause mass social harm, including violence against women and children.'

The most recent research shows that pornography related searches and downloads range between 10 and 20 per cent of overall internet traffic. While research on the algorithms that porn sites use is just beginning, what is very clear from the studies is that people are being shown and recommended new and more extreme forms of pornography compared to what they searched for or have even expressed an interest in. A 2024 study from Dublin City University shows that the recommender algorithms used by social media platforms are rapidly amplifying misogynistic and male supremacist content. The study tracked and recorded information to 10 neutral accounts on 10 blank smart phones, five on YouTube shorts and five on TikTok. The researchers found that all of the accounts that were identified as male accounts were fed masculinist, antifeminist and other extremist content irrespective of whether they sought out general or male supremacist related content, and they all received this content—this is the bit that really blows me away—within the first 23 minutes of the experiment. That is what the algorithm is feeding people whether they want it or not. And there are plenty of young men who will say to you, 'I believe in equality between men and women, girls and boys. I don't search out the stuff. They know I'm a bloke, possibly, because I'm looking up car videos, and the stuff that gets fed to me is violent, it is degrading, it is graphic and it is harmful.'

Released today was a study that outlined the link between social media use, pornography and choking, which has become very common in the sexual relations of teenagers and young adults. Choking is a sexual activity that is significantly on the rise. There is no question in my mind that it's on the rise because it's being depicted in pornographic videos that are being fed to young people in their social media accounts.

Researchers from the University of Melbourne and the University of Queensland raised the alarm about the harms done—again, mostly to women and girls—by the increasing adoption of this practice. Harms include, obviously, losing consciousness. Of course, every time you lose consciousness, you're damaging your brain, in the same way as you would if you were a footballer getting a knock to the head that knocked you unconscious. Obviously, it can lead to death in extreme cases—after minutes, mind you, it can lead to death. But harms also include the risk of strokes. In fact, sexual choking is the leading cause of strokes for women under the age of 40, according to this research. Most people engaged in these practices are not aware of the risks involved. I have to say: this is a really good example of where you need very explicit sex education for young people and you need very explicit consent education, because I don't believe you can consent to a practice unless you know that there is potential for brain damage, stroke or death from that practice.

I congratulate the Attorney-General for this very important legislation. It is one of the ways we are seeking to address the increasingly hostile and dangerous online world that exists for our children. I think the increasingly hostile and dangerous online world, instead of helping us build a better, more equal, fairer society, in many respects is taking us backwards.

I want to finish by saying to the eSafety Commissioner how important her work is and how much, as a government, we value the effort that she and her team are putting into creating a safer online world for our children. We cannot allow the progress that we've made, over decades, towards gender equality, or allow the progress that we want to make towards safety for women and girls from gender based violence, to be undermined by the tech bros and cowboys who think the rules don't apply to them.

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