TV presenter speaks out about abuse from online trolls
TELEVISION personality Erin Molan has revealed she feared going outside due to vicious online trolling, but when she reported a threat to kill her unborn baby to Facebook, the company told her it didn’t meet the threshold for “inappropriate” content.
The 39-year-old relayed countless examples of sickening abuse – including someone writing that they would rape 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 of the messages.
“It made me fear for my safety, it made me nervous about going outside.”
The single mother started to cry as she spoke about how she’d gone through a lot in her private life only for the trolling to become too much for her, despite her resilience and support from her family.
“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.
Molan 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 – to take effect from Sunday – that could lead to someone being fined for cyber abuse, would be effective.
Molan said a person being abused online shouldn’t have to get off social media – the perpetrators should.
“Being online is such a huge part of how we live our lives now,” she said.
“Why do I have to get off a platform I use professionally because someone’s threatening to rape my child?”