Allan wants to unmask the trolls — South Park already showed how that ends

Ten years ago, South Park built an entire season around a Danish website that promised to unmask every anonymous troll on the internet.

It was called Troll Trace, and it ended with the internet destroyed and its founder killed by the very troll he was hunting.

Jacinta Allan is not proposing Troll Trace.

But she is proposing that tech giants be forced to reveal who is behind anonymous accounts — and the echo is hard to miss.

The package, which the government calls an Australia-first, has two prongs: dragging anonymous accounts into the light, and making it easier to drag the platforms into court.

Premier Allan framed it as protecting families from the sharper edges of online platforms.

"Social media and AI companies design their platforms to be addictive, and our kids are paying the price," she said.

"If a platform hurts a child, families should be able to take that company to court."

Under the changes, the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal would gain "demasking orders" — the power to force social media companies to hand over the identity of anonymous users accused of breaching the state's anti-vilification laws.

"Hiding behind an anonymous account online should never mean you can vilify someone and get away with it," Allan said.

Attorney-General Sonya Kilkenny put it more bluntly: the reforms would help victims of online hate "find out who's really behind the keyboard".

This is where the South Park comparison runs out — and deliberately so.

Troll Trace let anyone look up anyone.

Allan's version routes through VCAT, is tied to existing vilification law, and unmasks a user only once the tribunal is satisfied there is a case to answer. It is a legal mechanism, not a search bar.

The second half of the package goes after the platforms directly.

Currently, a family suing a social media or AI company for negligence causing psychiatric harm to a child must prove permanent impairment of at least 10 per cent before a court will even hear it.

The government plans to scrap that threshold entirely for claims brought on behalf of minors, and would consider extending the change to adults as the law is drafted.

Allan said parents feel powerless watching how fast children are pulled into these platforms.

"I see it in my own household," she said.

The politics are not subtle. The laws are slated to reach parliament before November's state election.

And there is reason to temper expectations.

The Morrison government pitched near-identical anti-troll laws in 2021.

They never passed — and legal experts warned they offered little to ordinary people who lack the money to fight a tech giant in court.

The Allan government had no specific answer for how any of this would work against users based overseas or hiding behind a VPN.

Which is the part South Park got exactly right: unmasking people online is easy to announce and very, very hard to actually do.