Tuiono TeanauTEANAU TUIONO (Green): Thank you Mr Speaker. I'm going to give it a go the longest bill name: the Films Videos and Publications Classification (Urgent Interim Classification of Publications and Prevention of Online Harm) Amendment Bill. The Greens will be supporting this bill. Like many of the submitters and a number of the parties in the House as well we had a number of significant reservations around the internet filter so it's good to hear that the Minister of Internal Affairs worked with the Governance and Administration Committee to make a bill that is workable and I do want to acknowledge the select committee for that. I didn't have the pleasure of sitting in on the select committee process as well. The report was very thorough and I really appreciate being able to look back on what the different submitters said in terms of all of the issues presented.This bill addresses the specific legislative and regulatory gaps in our current online content regulation. These were highlighted in the tragic events of the Christchurch mosque attacks on the 15th of March 2019 and I think it's really important for us all around the House to continue to hold on to that in terms of how we respond to what happened in Christchurch in all the bits of legislation that come to this House. The terrorist of the Christchurch attacks sought to exploit online platforms to promote his acts of hate-based violence. Following the original livestream broadcast footage of the attacks spread across the internet through social media and in the days that followed we saw thousands of links appear across our social media platforms.When I was reading up about this bill as well it kind of made me reflect on the 1990s and the 1980s maybe because when this bill originally came out it was for you know things that came out in the films or came out on DVD or came out on cassette tapes or VHS tapes as well. I think all of us in the House probably remember those times and so having that legislation updated to respond to social media and the power of social media is really really important. The bill proposed to address this through a number of the following changes: creating a new offence of livestreaming objectionable content; allowing the Chief Censor to make interim classification decisions lasting for a maximum of 20 days—and it was interesting and good to know that actually the select committee and the Minister have sat down with the Chief Censor to really take a look at this legislation to get something that will be workable for him and his staff—allowing take-down notices to be issued to require the removal of objectionable online content and then of course the safe harbour" provisions that the Minister talked about earlier as well.You know censorship is a really difficult issue and so I will say thank you again to the Minister for qualifying what that was and what that meant in that context as well. I think people around New Zealand will now know that that is actually codified in another piece of legislation and what this is about is trying to make that all kind of usable for the Chief Censor and other officials. It is a difficult issue and the Greens have expressed the complexity of the problem in the past. It really needs to be consistent with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act framework protecting freedom of expression is a primary consideration and recognising the very real need to affect and address significant harms and create transparent and reviewable frameworks for any restriction.Clearly the internet filter that was proposed—to me it was an inadequate tool trying to deal with a very very horrendous problem and I also note what the Chief Censor said as well. But I have a quote here from one of the submitters Thomas Beagle of the New Zealand Council for Civil Liberties who said "We can't meaningfully stop … motivated users from accessing materials. There's just too many channels and too many mechanisms including encrypted chat rooms peer-to-peer file transfers websites … overseas and of course Virtual Private Networks … to ensure that no one in New Zealand can even [access what they're getting at]". But as I was going through some of the other submitters I was reading the Inclusive Aotearoa submission by Anjum Rahman and she focused on in one of the pieces of her submission algorithms. In that she said "Further algorithms have caused documented harm in moving individuals to more extreme and radicalised positions. Algorithms AI and machine learning systems should be subject to independent audit to ensure that outcomes of such systems are not causing harm. Such an audit must be a requirement for any electronic system envisaged in legislation." If you don't know what an algorithm is it's when you've got your phone and you only see about 100 pieces of content but actually because it's Facebook and all that there's like thousands and millions of pieces of content. So the algorithm prioritises actually what's in there.We often get caught up talking about the right to freedom of speech but maybe we need to start talking about the freedom of reach: the ability for objectionable content wherever it might be or particular opinions to actually be disseminated far and wide across social media networks. The algorithm picks from those options based on the kind of content you engaged with most of all in the past.I was watching the news—not on Facebook or not on Twitter; actually on the TV for a change—and there was an article by the whistleblower Frances Haugen who was a product manager on the civic integrity team at Facebook. She was talking about—she was a whistleblower and you know Facebook is a trillion-dollar company. I can't even imagine a trillion dollars let alone a billion dollars. One of the things she said is that one of the consequences of how Facebook is picking up that content today is it is optimising for content that gets engagement or reaction but its own research has shown that content that is hateful that is divisive that is polarising is easier to inspire people to anger than it is to other emotions. And yes Facebook has realised that if they change the algorithm to be safer people will spend less time on the site they'll click on less ads and they'll make less money. She revealed that they kind of turn these settings off and on. When they saw that a particular president was getting incredibly problematic they turned on a whole lot of settings; he disappeared. They turned them off again and next thing you know the events at the Capitol house happened as well.So we need to get that balance right for freedom of speech but let's start thinking about freedom of reach because possibly this is where the issue is. Through the pandemic you know I've talked to anti-vaxxers that have gone down the rabbit hole. We know that the proliferation—for vulnerable young men in particular they can disappear down these rabbit holes and next thing you know it radicalises them in very very dangerous dangerous dangerous ways.So my reading of this bill is it does improve things. It will make things better for us. But what it has also done for me is actually open up a whole lot of other questions because at the end of the day what we want to do I think right around the House is to make sure that we reduce harm that we mitigate harm and that we promote a peaceful Aotearoa. So we know the algorithm's really good at making Facebook money and stuff like that—good at making the social media giants money—but what about an algorithm for conflict resolution? What about an algorithm for I don't know climate justice an algorithm for world peace and an algorithm which actually helps to deal with the problems that we have around the world? So we will be supporting this bill but we've got a lot of work ahead of us. Thank you Mr Speaker."