This is a three-year Discovery Project funded by the Australian Research Council and based at the Centre for Media Transition at UTS. The Chief Investigators are Professor Derek Wilding, Dr Karen Lee, Professor David Lindsay and Professor Anita Stuhmcke.
Aiming to address the escalating challenge of online harms, such as disinformation, hate speech, and violent content, this project investigates the potential of co-regulation—where industry develops rules that are enforced by a regulator—to effectively mitigate these issues on digital platforms. Despite its widespread use in the communications sector, the concept of 'co-regulation' remains under-theorised, and its efficacy has not been systematically evaluated.
This research will establish an evidential base for optimising co-regulation within the contemporary Australian communications landscape. It will benefit regulators intent on achieving public policy goals, consumers affected by online harms, and digital platforms that could otherwise face blunt regulatory measures. The project objectives are to:
provide a definitive, comparative analysis of the use of industry codes of practice, scrutinising direct participation by industry actors, their compliance strategies, and the integration of embedded values in code rules, as well as examining the effects of regulatory interventions.
apply this enhanced understanding of industry-led regulation to explore its optimisation as part of a more comprehensive and coherent regulatory framework for digital platforms.
The overarching research question is: how should Australia’s communications regulatory framework be designed to simultaneously harness industry expertise while ensuring public policy objectives are achieved?