He pointed to the different legal burdens facing traditional media and digital platforms as an issue needing attention. He said the new players should be treated the same as the old.

"My own view ... is that online platforms, so far as reasonably possible, should be held to essentially the same standards as other publishers," Mr Porter told an audience at the National Press Club.

"But you have to, of course, take into account, reasonable, sensible measures for how you do that ... because of the volume of what goes on in Twitter and Facebook is much larger than the volume from a standard newspaper."

He said the issue needed to be dealt with as "urgently as possible" and "the playing field between digital platforms and mainstream media is completely uneven".

He expressed concern about a NSW Supreme Court decision handed down in June that found media companies liable for defamatory comments made on their public Facebook pages by users of the platform. Mr Porter labelled the ruling "very curious" and made the playing field even less even, declaring reform was necessary.

Facebook has resisted describing itself as a publisher, maintaining it is a tech company not a media company. It has come under pressure for this position, facing calls to accept more responsibility for the information spread over its platform.

Mr Porter also laid out more immediate recommendations under the national defamation reform process. He called for a serious harm threshold to be introduced as well as a clarified cap on damages. He called for consideration of a new defence for "responsible communication on a matter of public interest", akin to a feature of New Zealand law he said was working well.

Media organisations, including Nine Entertainment Co, owner of this masthead, have also called for reform to freedom of information laws. Mr Porter said there was "room for significant improvement" in the area, conceding there had been examples of "poor responses" by government departments and the system could better prioritise important requests.

He predicted there would be recommendations for freedom of information reform put forward by Parliament's intelligence and security committee in its press freedom inquiry.