Netsafety Week 2023

We are hosting Netsafety Week again this year to help provide practical tools and harm prevention support to enable New Zealanders to get the most benefit – and the least harm – while living their digital lives.

This year’s Netsafety Week theme is:

Arming Aotearoa with the tools for positive online experiences

This year’s theme focuses on resilience and self-defence; building knowledge and tactical tools for an online world that remains imperfect.

The week will provide New Zealanders with opportunities to learn new skills, hear from industry experts, and discover new tools and education products.

During the week, focussed on harm prevention, we hope to provoke conversations around:

the impact of social media on our professional and personal lives,
how employers can support their staff online,
how New Zealanders can arm themselves against the rise of scams,
how to have more positive experiences on some of our most popular platforms, and
tools for young people to lead positive change in their school communities.

When is Netsafety Week?

Netsafety Week will take place between 24 and 30 July 2023. There will be a variety of tools, webinars and education materials available throughout the week.

Netsafety Week Events Programme (subject to change):

Monday, 12.30pm NZST

Panel Webinar: Discussing content moderation and takedown dilemmas between freedom of expression and harmful content and other Human Rights [1 hour] *with NZ Sign Language Live Interpreter

PANELLISTS:

Brent is the Chief Executive Office of Netsafe, New Zealand’s online safety charity. He has broad and extensive experience in regulatory, privacy, safety and justice environments along with a good understanding of both local and global online safety ecosystems. He was New Zealand’s second Domain Name Commissioner (2017 -2022) overseeing the .nz domain name space. He has worked for two Privacy Commissioners and an Australian Senator.

Brent serves on the Governance Committee of the Aotearoa New Zealand Code of Practice for Online Safety Harms adopted by Meta (Facebook and Instagram) Google (You Tube), TikTok, Twitch and Twitter. He is involved with several international bodies, including the International Council for Online Dispute Resolution and the Global Internet Forum to Counter-Terrorism. He is an Associate member of the Arbitrators and Mediators Institute of New Zealand and Member of Te Kotahitanga o Te Atiawa iwi, the indigenous peoples of Aotearoa (New Zealand). He is Co-Founder of Taranaki Agribusiness Green Meadows Beef.

A national of Aotearoa and UK, Paul Hunt studied law at Cambridge University and Waikato University.

He has lived, and undertaken human rights work, in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Aotearoa.

For more than a decade, Paul served as an independent human rights expert for the United Nations, reporting to the UN General Assembly and UN Human Rights Council. He wrote and presented some 30 UN reports, including on the World Trade Organisation, World Bank, IMF, Guantanamo Bay, the Israel-Lebanon conflict in 2006, and on numerous countries.

Paul’s focus was the human rights to healthcare and health protection. Between 2011 and 2013, he was senior human rights adviser to WHO Assistant Director-General Dr. Flavia Bustreo.

He has published extensively on human rights and has been awarded two Honorary Doctorates in recognition of his scholarship.

Paul was appointed New Zealand’s Chief Human Rights Commissioner in 2019.

Last year, he was awarded the Ann Dysart Distinguished Service Award by the civil society organisation, Multicultural New Zealand.

Jonathan Ayling is the Chief Executive of the Free Speech Union. A former-Parliamentary advisor, he has advocated for civil liberties and human rights both in New Zealand and overseas. Having grown up in Mozambique shortly after the transition from communism, Jonathan is especially conscience of the need for free speech to elevate marginalised and disempowered voices. He lives in the sunny Wairarapa with his wife and son, where they own a boutique vineyard.

Natalia is a consultant at Habilis New Zealand Ltd., engaged in social investment and strategic consulting. Her background as an academic means she has nearly a decade of research expertise in the area of online safety and cyber abuse, with a specific focus on gendered outcomes. She also represents the Netsafe Board as a founding member of the Women’s Online Safety Partnership: a multi-sector working group with the purpose of addressing technology facilitated gendered violence. Her previous research has involved industry sponsors and collaborators including Netsafe and TechWomen and her work has received significant media interest. Natalia joined Netsafe’s board in 2020.

Claire is Principal at Albany Senior High School in Auckland, New Zealand. She was also one of the three foundation Deputy Principals at Hobsonville Point Secondary School. Claire has worked for a variety of schools and educational organisations in her twenty-plus year teaching career. This has included working at a number of new and established secondary schools as well as working on various national projects with the NZ Ministry of Education, the Network for Learning and, and the New Zealand Qualifications Authority. Claire was a member of the Teachers Council and was a founding member of the Education Council of Aotearoa. Claire is also a member of Global Women NZ and co-founder of DisruptEDNZ. She joined Netsafe’s board in 2013.

Limited spaces. Register here to secure your place today.

Tuesday, 12pm NZST

Staying safe online is everybody’s business. To help you achieve this, TikTok will share the tools that are available to put you in control. They will cover topics like Family Pairing, managing comments in a way that work for you, how to report content and share the tools that are available to protect younger users. You’ll also hear how TikTok moderates, what they do proactively and how we can work together to keep our community safe online. The session will also feature a brief Q&A.

A live NZSL Sign Language Interpreter will support us during this event for accessibility.

Limited Spaces – Secure your free place today by registering here

Wednesday, 10am NZST

MORE INFO:

Social media platforms are a key site of community, for many people. The individuals who volunteer to act as ‘admins’ and ‘moderators’ for these groups or pages, often take on a underacknowledged or behind-the-scenes leadership role. Typically without any training or support, they develop skills for dealing with hate speech, dangerous speech, misinformation, interpersonal conflict, mental health crises, and more.

In this workshop, we introduce you the work of the ‘Tagging In Project’; including the free online resource that was created from interviews with social media admins in Aotearoa, and from a number of different communities, about their experiences. We will use this to provide some structured prompts to think through your own online contexts; what are the issues specific to your community? What strategies might you use to either prevent, or respond to, these? What values will guide you in making difficult decisions? Where can you turn if things do go awry? By discussing and sharing our own knowledge, we will learn from each other.

Dr Susan Wardell (she/her) is an academic and writer based at the University of Otago in Ōtepoti Dunedin. Her research focuses on care, health and disability, moral emotion, mental health, and digital sociality. This has included a recent project focused on online responses to the Christchurch mosque attacks, another project examining lived experiences of online medical crowdfunding in Aotearoa, and an applied project on the role of social media admins in responding to dangerous speech. Alongside academic work, Susan is passionate about public communication, including creative and visual communication.

Limited to 25 participants – Secure your place today by registering here

Friday, 10am

New Zealand is ‘Closed to Harassment’!
This Netsafety Week, Netsafe is launching an online Social Media Self Defence Course called ‘Closed to Harassment’ as part of its mission to arm Aotearoa with the tools for positive online experiences. New Zealanders everywhere are being asked to be ‘Closed to Harassment’ for one hour on Friday, 28 July ideally at 10am to take part in the course by visiting closedtoharassment.co.nz

Online harassment is taking place on a daily basis, and for many New Zealanders avoiding online spaces is not an option as they need to build their profiles, their reputations, and share work with their peers to further their careers.

Scam Prevention for Seniors events nationwide
Monday, Wednesday & Thursday

In person events in Nelson, Auckland and Christchurch

Netsafe ‘Scambassador’ Bronwyn Groot will present three in-person workshops in Auckland, Nelson, and Christchurch retirement villages (for residents only), along with a pre-recorded video supported by Chorus, as well as updating the Little Black Book of Scams free downloadable resource.

Bronwyn Groot is a Netsafe “scambassador” dealing with cybercrime every day.

In this session, Bronwyn will provide you with expert advice and information, and arm you with the tools to recognise a scam, what to do if things go wrong, and steps you can take to keep yourself and your family safe.

Receiving multiple awards for her work over the years, Brownyn has spent more than a decade tackling scams and fraud for organisations, including the Commission for Financial Capability and various high street banks. An expert adviser, Bronwyn offers support and training to people and businesses about the latest scams and fraud, from investment scams that are too good to be true, to romance scams that result in broken hearts and broken bank balances, Bronwyn has seen it all.

Netsafety Week Tools Launch List

CheckNetsafe.NZ Anti-Scam Tool

Scammers are so clever, it can be hard to tell what is real and what is fake. So, to try and help you sort the good deals from the good for-nothings, Netsafe has a smart new tool – checknetsafe.nz

Type in or copy and paste the web address link you want to check and within seconds you will know if the link is likely a scam or legitimate checknetsafe.nz

Little Black Book of Scams

Compiled by Bronwyn Groot, Netsafe ‘scambassador’ and NZ Anti-Fraud Award winner, the Little Black Book of Scams tells you almost everything you need to know about the most common scams targeting New Zealanders today. You can download a copy to read on your device or print it out to keep at home.

View or download the Little Black Book of Scams here.

“Closed to Harassment” Online Course:

Our new, free, social media self-defence course covers:

How to recognise online abuse and the impact it has on our working lives.
How to set up your social media accounts and profiles with safety in mind.
How to deal with online abuse through reporting and protecting your wellbeing. This includes information on the practical role Netsafe has in safeguarding New
Zealanders from online harm.

Find it here – closedtoharassment.co.nz

Youth Action Squad Toolkit for young leaders

Created by rangatahi, for rangatahi, this new interactive website (https://netsafeyas.nz) of resources launches to schools nationwide to enable students to create their own ‘YAS local leader’ groups and implement relevant, fun, online safety education and prevention initiatives within their school communities! Find out more about our Youth Action Squad here.

If you’d like to receive email updates about Netsafety Week so you’re across all of the latest developments:

As a Not-for-Profit we rely on sponsorship support to make our annual online safety week the best it can be. If your business would like to partner with us by either sponsoring part of the week or offering in-kind support, please email [email protected]

The great news for individuals is, you now have the option to support Netsafe’s important work by making a koha donation via our Givealittle page https://givealittle.co.nz/org/netsafe

(or scan the QR code!)

Netsafety Week 2023

Arming Aotearoa with the tools for positive online experiences

When is Netsafety Week?