TV presenter tells of terrible online abuse

TELEVISION personality Erin Molan has revealed that she feared going outside due to vicious online trolling, but when she reported a threat to kill her unborn baby to Facebook it told her it did not meet the threshold for “inappropriate” content.

The 39-year-old Sky News contributor (pictured) relayed countless examples of sickening abuse – including someone writing they would abuse her two-year-old – while giving evidence to a powerful parliamentary inquiry into social media and online safety on Tuesday.

Molan said she was inundated with terrifying messages after she began hosting The Footy Show, and she soon became nervous to leave her home.

“Not things like ‘we don’t like watching you’, but things like ‘we want to ensure you die, I’ll hit you with a bus’,” she said.

“It made me fear for my safety, it made me nervous about going outside.”

The single mother started to cry when speaking about how she’d gone through a lot in her private life and – despite her resilience and support from her family – the trolling became too much.

“When you’re subjected to something so often and for so long and it is so repetitive and so awful, even the strongest people in the world can start to maybe believe that maybe a bit of it is true,” she said.

“But once I realised that Mother Teresa could build an orphanage in Botswana, and they would still go online and absolutely annihilate her, once I realised that it happens to tens of thousands of other people, it’s awful, but I felt a little bit comforted by the fact I wasn’t actually all the things they’re saying I am.”

She said world-first draft legislation that would compel social media companies to hand over the identities of trolls in defamation cases was important in taking away their power.

She also said new powers given to the eSafety Commissioner in the Online Safety Act – which will take effect from Sunday – that could lead to someone being fined for cyber abuse would be effective.

She said it would set a bare minimum standard of behaviour and filter down to improve things from a societal perspective by setting an example.

“The personal impact of this on people, we’ve seen people take their lives, we’ve seen kids try to take their lives, we’ve seen many lives ruined by this kind of behaviour,” she said.

“If you take away their anonymity and you take away their power, all of a sudden it’s a level playing field again and that’s what it needs to be.”