Victorian Anti-Bullying Rapid Review recommends platform-level transparency requirements

The Victorian Government has released the findings of its Anti-Bullying Rapid Review, a six-month inquiry into the effectiveness of current school-based interventions and the role of digital platforms in facilitating cyberbullying. The final report recommends that the Commonwealth Government impose transparency obligations on social media and messaging platforms operating in Australia, requiring them to disclose the volume of user reports related to bullying and harassment involving users under 18, the proportion actioned within 24 hours, and the nature of enforcement measures applied. The review also calls for a standardised national definition of cyberbullying for use across education and online-safety regulation, and for greater investment in teacher training on digital evidence collection. The recommendations have been referred to the Commonwealth Attorney-General and to the eSafety Commissioner for consideration in the current review of the Online Safety Act.

Transparency reporting documents harm after it occurs; the operational gap lies in detection before content is disseminated or normalised within a peer group. Guardii's anti-cyberbullying filter identifies hostile, coercive or escalating exchanges in direct messages as they happen across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, Roblox and other platforms, reporting the shape and seriousness of the conversation to the adults responsible for a child's safety without exposing message content. By surfacing a child experiencing sustained targeting to a parent or school in real time, the system supports the early intervention and evidence-informed response the Victorian review identifies as critical, and does so without depending on platform cooperation or the willingness of a distressed young person to self-report.