Banning nudification apps and tackling Big Tech: helping female MPs take back control of their feeds

In a single week last month, police investigated four separate cases, in some instances alleged cases, of online abuse against Australian female politicians.They were looking into multiple instances of violent threats directed at NSW Agriculture Minister Tara Moriarty over the feral pig cull. They charged a 43-year-old man, Christopher Mark Whitty, for allegedly sending serious online threats to NSW MP Liesl Tesch. Luke Poulton, 33, appeared in court charged with alleged harassment and disorderly behaviour at the electorate office of South Australian MP Nat Cook, compounded by allegedly abusive comments posted online. (Both Poulton and Whitty’s cases are still being defended before the courts.) And a Sydney man, Steven Ly, 31, was sentenced after being found guilty of threatening, via email, to kill federal MP Anika Wells and her family – she has three children under 10.In the same week, the results of a national study, Online Abuse and Women’s Political Participation, were announced. It revealed that 90 per cent of our female politicians and candidates at federal, state and local levels have been subjected to online abuse. And internationally, research has found more than 40 per cent of online abuse of women in the public sphere is now moving offline, translating into real-world danger.How bad is all this? Well, it’s not the UK, where two female MPs have been murdered in the past decade (the death by bludgeoning of Anne Widdecombe, a former UK and European MP, occurred only nine weeks ago). It’s not the US, where judicial appointments are political, and a female District Court judge’s son was killed in her own home after her address was published online. It’s not Zimbabwe, where an organisation helping women running for political office had more than a dozen of their alumni murdered in the last election cycle.But it’s bad, and it’s getting worse.Licia Heath is the CEO of Women for Election – an organisation that helps women figure out how to enter politics. “I don’t want to be having this conversation because an MP has been killed in office or a candidate’s been killed,” she says. “Is that what we’re waiting for? Sometimes I fear it is.”Can online abuse against women in politics be stopped? And if so, how?Of course, male politicians are also targets of online abuse. In August, while the four women above were dealing with their cases, a 28-year-old woman, Sienna-Rose Caprari Corby, was sentenced for sending NSW Premier Chris Minns death threats via social media.The difference between what male and female politicians experience basically comes down to misogyny, says UK-based Australian researcher Julie Posetti: “Misogyny manifesting in highly sexualised abuse and threats of sexual violence. Male politicians might get, ‘You’re incompetent, you’re stupid.’ And they may also get death threats. But men are not threatened with being raped to death. They’re not threatened with their female children being raped to death. Nor are nudification apps being used against men.”Nudification apps and deepfake software are AI tools in which the user can take a standard image of a woman, “and effectively commit synthetic rape,” says Posetti. “They can pose the women, they can strip them. They can produce deepfake [images or video] that have the women being pack-raped. I mean, it’s horrific. And for most people, it’s impossible to tell that this is not, in fact, that woman’s body. And as I say, this is not being done to men. Women in politics are the primary targets.”In Australia, the non-consensual use of such tools has been progressively criminalised since 2024. But it’s still not illegal to create, distribute or download an adult nudification app itself – though this may change, according to Communications Minister Anika Wells. “We are working to ban nudify apps, which have no valid purpose,” she told Good Weekend.Aleta Moriarty, an independent candidate in the upcoming Victorian state election, receives up to 1000 abusive Facebook messages a day. In the meantime, the formidable job of implementing the law as it stands falls to Julie Inman Grant, head of the eSafety Commission. The establishment of this commission, along with the Online Safety Act 2021, were global firsts by Australia. And despite being personally subject to “deepfakes, doxxing [the publication of personal details online] and death threats”, Inman Grant has already shut down or restricted seven nudification sites in the past 18 months – including three sites this May, one of which was recording more than 50,000 downloads a month. As a whole, the eSafety Commission has been successful in removing close to 90 per cent of image-based abuse reported to it.Inman Grant is also trying to persuade Big Tech to clean up their own platforms, via built-in safety features and new Duty of Care legislation. The first draft of this legislation was released by the government on Tuesday. As well as asking platforms to proactively crack down on content such as misogyny, and giving the Commission expanded powers to combat nudification apps, the proposed laws would compel platforms to offer social media users choices about how their feeds are delivered. Currently, algorithms preference “high engagement” content – often involving rage, hate, or abuse, especially of women – because engagement drives profits.If this legislation becomes law, breaches could attract the maximum fine the eSafety commission can levy: $100 million. This will certainly add to Inman Grant’s firepower - but the battle is yet to be won. Independent political candidate Aleta Moriarty is a social rights expert who’s worked in some of the world’s most dangerous troublespots, including Myanmar and Cambodia. But now that she’s standing in the Western Victoria electorate in November’s state election, she’s receiving up to 1000 abusive comments a day on Facebook.Some abuse is simply idiotic: labelling her a ‘Polly Pocket’ … But there’s also ‘a lot of rape, attack, violence stuff’.Some are simply idiotic: labelling her a “Polly Pocket” while a rival male candidate is called “a courageous footballer”. (His international conflict zone experience remains unclear.) But there’s also “a lot of rape, attack, violence stuff: what they would do to me and how they would f--- me,” she explains. Others are misogyny writ large: “Hope you get breast cancer and die a slow painful death you maggot.”Facebook supposedly enforces its own behavioural code. However, of 100-odd comments Moriarty has reported because they are, she says, 1) misogynistic; 2) bullying; 3) pro-Nazi; 4) sexually explicit; 5) threatening violence or 6) threatening rape, “maybe one or two have been taken down. Facebook just goes, ‘This hasn’t breached our community standards.’ Is everyone just asleep at the wheel here?”This is a common story – and not just for female politicians. Many Australians feel digitally helpless: as if the major platforms, with their multibillion-dollar global revenues, are literally beyond the reach of any nation’s laws. And yet, in 2024, the Brazilian government successfully shut down Elon Musk’s X across the entire country for more than a month, after it refused to remove accounts accused of attacking democratic institutions and spreading hate speech. And just last month, Meta (owner of Facebook and Instagram) agreed to pay $US18 billion for driving online addiction in children; it will also have to implement safety features such as night blocks and two-hour daily limits. (Neither X nor Meta responded to requests for interview.)So perhaps the tide is turning. In the past five years, the Australian government has taken historic steps to shield Australians from online harm; now it looks ready to do even more. On Tuesday, Prime Minister Albanese told reporters: “We’re a sovereign nation. We decide our policies based upon the Australian national interest.” Certainly, what’s becoming clear is that if any government truly wants to protect its people – including women like Moriarty – it can.Not all online protections for female politicians require national confrontation with global tech titans. Most politicians, after all, are flat out just managing their inboxes. But thanks to AI, content has become so vast in volume, and so “violent, personal and vile” in nature, according to Jacqueline Comer, the founder of safety software company Areto Labs, that this can be a lose-lose scenario: engage and traumatise yourself and/or your staff; remove yourself from social media and lose a massive section of your audience, especially in rural or local electorates.In this environment, some politicians try a third way. Liesbeth Long is an ex-mayor and current councillor in Victoria. She’s a natural enthusiast, thrilled to promote local sports teams and the Country Women’s Association, yet she regularly receives long, incoherent, rage-filled voicemails from local men, and obscene messages featuring phrases like “dildo humper”. Occasionally, she tries to confront these men in real life. “Only the non-sexual ones,” she points out. “I’ll say, ‘Let’s have a coffee and a chat, my shout.’ Two people have taken me up. The first guy, he was shaking in his boots, but we had a really good chat and the next day, every single comment he’d made about me was deleted.” The second guy is “still a bit gnarly online, but not as bad as he was”.This is a gutsy move, and – surprisingly – almost universal among the female politicians in this story. But a safer, lower-risk alternative might be to neutralise the vitriol where it begins: online. Software such as that from Areto Labs works as an automatic censor on social media accounts: as the user, you decide what words and phrases are unacceptable, and any message containing them is instantly removed into a quarantined file, where you can review, reinstate or delete it; or archive it for evidentiary purposes.‘For the first time in my life, I was locking my house while I was inside … I knew he had firearms and weapons.’Liesbeth Long, a former mayor and current councillor in VictoriaA similar app, Social Protect, founded by former ASIO agent Shane Britten, does essentially the same thing. “We’re not stopping negativity,” he explains. “We’re not stopping criticism or disagreements. We’re stopping hatred and abuse. So if one of your constituents says, ‘I disagree with your policy; I think that’s a terrible decision; you’re impacting my business,’ none of that will be moderated. But if they say, ‘Go kill yourself,’ that will be removed. Because that has no place in democratic discourse.”Platforms such as these are now removing hundreds of thousands of comments from the accounts of Australian female politicians. “In July alone, we monitored the accounts of 106 female and gender-diverse politicians in Australia and New Zealand,” explains Comer. “Those 106 accounts received 352,244 comments, of which 165,678 were [removed] for breaching user standards. That’s almost 50 per cent – unbelievably high. A toxic sports brand, we might moderate 10 per cent.”In recognition of the scale of the problem, both Areto Labs and Social Protect are offering their services free, thanks to philanthropic donors, to female candidates and politicians in Australia. Victorian MP Georgie Purcell recently told women-in-politics group Pathways to Politics that “Social Protect has allowed me to take back control and feel safe [on social media]“. Aleta Moriarty, who began using a similar app during the writing of this story, isn’t quite so enthusiastic. “It’s been good at quarantining stuff when I’m on my own page,” she says. But on other group or community Facebook pages, “I get hounded still.” As this story went to press, she made a police report about several hundred comments wishing for her death. A single example: “I wish nothing but pain death and suffering to you.”What happens when online abuse against female politicians translates into the real world? What are we doing to protect these women from physical harm?Strictly speaking, politicians in Australia have no formal “employer” – which means no single entity is legally responsible for their work-related safety. Instead, the administrative body of parliament or council looks after them (a bit), as do their political parties (very little) and the police (under very specific circumstances).In practice, this means they’re almost always on their own. Bronnie Taylor is the irrepressible former deputy leader of the NSW National Party and former NSW minister for women. As a politician, she dealt for years with abuse and threats, both online and off, from a man in her electorate called Andrew Thaler.Thaler, an elected councillor, has attracted multiple code of conduct complaints (including 19 separate complaints in two months in 2024); he’s been suspended from council twice; this June, proceedings were initiated against him in the NSW Industrial Relations Commission on behalf of the current female CEO of his council, whom he has called, among other things, “silly bitch”, “short little f---ing witch”, and “little Vietnamese girl with a boy’s name”.The logical avenue to seek redress in such a scenario – and with such a person – should surely be a legal one. And at one point, Taylor personally did begin the process of applying for an AVO against Thaler. “But the police said, ‘Bronnie, you’ll have to take the stand and you’ll have to explain yourself and he’ll be able to cross-examine you.’ And I thought, ‘I don’t want to be defined by this. I’ve got so much shit I want to get done.’ ” So she dropped the application. But she’d like to see changes to criminal law to make these sorts of applications swifter and simpler. “At the moment we – me, and a lot of other women – feel like the law, and the police, are failing us.”Liesbeth Long experienced a similar situation in 2024: a single individual was sending her 10, 15, 20 texts a day – long, rambling, obscene – plus multiple voicemails. (Good Weekend has heard some: blizzards of profane, irrational insults and threats.) “For the first time in my life, I was locking my house while I was inside,” admits Long. “I was so fearful of him knocking on my door – I knew he had firearms and weapons.” She was granted an AVO; and since then, she says, “there’s been nothing. Not a peep.”This might seem like a victory, but Long would like to see more prosecutions succeed, and more support while they’re in process. “I got absolutely no counselling or support [from council]. We need a zero-tolerance policy, and definitely harsher penalties. Let’s take this shit serious.”Taylor, meanwhile, has been told “by a lot of people: ‘Just ignore it. Don’t worry about it. Toughen up.’ That’s bullshit, frankly. As women, we’ve decided that we want to lead. We’ve put ourselves forward, we are using our voices. If we say we feel threatened, we mean it.”NSW Labor MP Liesl Tesch became an incomplete paraplegic at 19 and is a multiple-gold-medal winning Paralympian. She found the alleged online threats that led to Mark Whitty’s arrest last month devastating. “It’s not the first time it’s happened, but this is probably a more harming-my-soul experience,” she says. “When the police texted me at night to say someone’s been arrested, it was like, ‘Holy macaroni, Liesl.’ I try to just have a thick skin and move on. But this is really horrible.”MP Liesl Tesch tries to “just have a thick skin and move on”, but is now calling for greater security measures for female politicians.Steven SiewertIn her case, the issue is not with the police or the law, but the rest of her security. She has a security system at her home in the Central Coast’s Gosford (which she installed, at her own expense, after an earlier incident in which someone graffitied the bike path outside her home with the words “Kill All Politicians”). She’s also installed a security app on her phone. “So if a man comes up to me, I can say, ‘Hang on a minute, I’ll just open the app,’ ” she points out drily. And she’s also looking into “something that apparently we can wear, like attached to a keyring, where if there’s an incident it goes to security. But that’s just hearsay through other women [in parliament] – nobody’s officially told me about it.”Tesch wants this rather motley collection of security measures improved. “It will come at a cost to taxpayers, which is horrible,” she admits. “I don’t want to take any money away from my health system or my education system for my personal safety. But the reality is, we want to have a safe space where women politicians can be out and about in our communities.”MP Greg Piper agrees. As speaker of the NSW lower house, he heads up the administrative arm of parliament, which includes safety within parliamentary buildings and electorate offices. He’s overseeing a program of security upgrades at the latter, and he’s asked the Australian Tax Office to allow MPs to claim their home security systems as a work-related expense. “We’ve asked twice,” he says ruefully. “And we’ve been knocked back twice.”Parliament also has its own security team that can offer advice about online abuse but, as Piper points out, it’s not easy to find the budget to pay for universal safety measures, or to convince some politicians that they need them. “There’s a whole range of things we need to do to make sure women are not deterred from entering parliament,” he says. “And I love Liesl Tesch – I was so upset to hear what’s happened – so I want to offer her every support. I want every woman who comes into this place to feel that support.”Retired Liberal MP Karen Andrews knows what such support feels like. The day she was sworn in as the federal minister for home affairs in 2021, the Australian Federal Police were at her home before she left the Parliament building: she had 24/7 protection while she held the role.“I can’t thank the AFP enough for what they did for me and my family,” she says now. “I’ve always loved walking, but [with the AFP] I could walk at nine o’clock at night because I had two people with guns with me. I didn’t realise how often I’d changed my behaviour behaved simply because I was a woman. And then, with them, I didn’t have to be scared of anything.”What other things should be done to protect women in politics? There are broad cultural steps, such as improving education about healthy masculinity for men and boys, says Dr Michelle Ryan, director of the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at Australian National University. “This abuse is about sexism, power, control. So that’s what you’ve got to address.”There are legal refinements, such as making misogyny part of the legal definition of hate speech, that would give added teeth to prosecutions. “Our discrimination act already protects gender,” points out Tesch, “but the misogyny piece isn’t sufficiently defined.”There are even simple practical steps, such as removing the requirement for political candidates at state and local level to publish personal addresses and phone numbers. As an independent, Aleta Moriarty has no party office, so her only option is to use her home address on her campaign materials – and the last time she did that “a man turned up at my house at 8pm while I was bathing my kids. It’s like I’m being doxxed by the Victorian Electoral Commission.”In the big scheme of things, finally, there is something all of us can do. We can recommit, as a nation, to the project of our democracy. We are one of very few nations on earth with compulsory, preferential, accessible voting; with a reputation for fair vote counting; and with a world-leading reputation for close-to-gender-equity at every level of our government.Governor General Sam Mostyn says Australia needs “more civility” for when people don’t agree – and that we don’t have to agree.Getty ImagesSam Mostyn, Australia’s Governor General, is proud of this reputation. When it comes to women’s political participation in particular, “as a nation, we have done so well,” she says. “From a starting point 50 years ago of basically zero, we now have 50 per cent female federal ministers; half the cabinet seats and economic portfolios are held by women; the governor of the Reserve Bank; the head of Treasury. It’s just staggering to think that despite all that, we are still talking about people trying to make women feel they don’t belong.”When Mostyn travels the world, she says, “people often talk to me about how well we’re doing in the online space in Australia – with AI, with the social media ban. We’re seen as world leaders; as a country that doesn’t just let things happen to it. And that’s what we need to draw on when it comes to online abuse against women across our society, and specifically in politics, too.”This is complex work, she acknowledges – but it’s also simple. “We need more civility in dimensions where people don’t agree with one another,” she says. “That doesn’t mean we all have to agree. It just means we have to, as a country, deeply care for the way we debate the really tough issues of our time: without anger or menace or violence.”In Mostyn’s view, Australians – men and women both – have always been good at this. She hopes we still can be. “Being able to disagree well is a great skill to have as a country.”Get the best of Good Weekend delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning. Sign up for our newsletter.Read more from Good Weekend magazine:‘The bots just botting each other’: In the world of jobseeking, an absurd future is upon usElijah was 10 when his friend typed ‘porn’ into a search engine. He was afraid – but unable to look awayJelena Dokic on abuse and resilience, body positivity and trolls