The eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, appeared before senators on Thursday morning at a hearing into the government's proposed social media bill aimed at stopping trolling.

The proposed anti-trolling bill, announced in December last year and drafted in February, aims to increase controls against online abuse by requiring social media companies to identify people behind anonymous accounts.

It establishes a framework for "end-user information disclosure orders", which would allow victims to obtain information from social media companies such as country location data and contact details for alleged perpetrators to proceed with defamation cases.

Communications Minister Paul Fletcher has said the bill would make defamation law fit for modern technology. But it's been pointed out the bill doesn't contain the word "troll", despite being labelled "anti-trolling" legislation.

Ms Inman Grant told the legal and constitutional affairs legislation committee the bill contained confusion and conflation.

"The primary issues that can be described around this legislation are conflation, confusion [and] oversimplification of very complex technical and legal challenges, creating public expectations that cannot be met by any government agency - and frankly no provision right now for a dedicated place to go [for] victims [who] encounter online defamation," she said.

"Defamation laws were created for the print age, not the digital age, and cannot keep up with the velocity of social media commentary."

In an earlier written submission to the inquiry, the eSafety office criticised the bill for confusing trolling with defamation, which it said were two distinct issues.

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Ms Inman Grant said mixing trolling and defamation in the legislation was like "mixing apples and oranges", and that each involved different levels and types of harm. Trolling did not necessarily equate to defamation, she said.

The commissioner said the Attorney-General's Department should provide a clear path for complainants to make referrals in the bill.

"It's not our area of expertise. We don't have the ability to deal with truth or falsity and we're dealing with high volumes of serious cyber abuse, so this really detracts from what our core business is," Ms Inman Grant said.

Peak bodies such as the Law Council of Australia further raised concerns of the bill's accessibility to everyday Australians due to the expense of defamation proceedings.

"The expensive court proceedings is not ultimately going to give the community that protection and if anything is more likely to lead to defamatory material remaining online when there are better mechanisms to have it removed," the council's president, Tass Liveris, said.

The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, the Alannah and Madeline Foundation and Dolly's Dream also expressed concerns over the bill throughout the hearing on Thursday.

Attorney-General's Department assistant secretary Michael Johnson said the bill not passing would risk the issues of social media abuse never being addressed.

Lawyer and human rights advocate Nyadol Nyuon earlier told the inquiry she doubted whether the bill would be useful, despite her own experience of being trolled online.

Ms Nyuon said the most significant abuse she experienced online would be something this bill wouldn't be able to address due to the sheer volume of people and trolls online.

"The bill is narrow, it doesn't catch up with the way that online abuse shifts ... the most significant abuse online seems quite innocent," she said

Ms Nyuon described her own experience as "a video made by someone using the experience of a member of my family and making accusations about me that was not true and asking his followers to make a series of questions".

"The idea around it was to simply overwhelm me with getting hundreds of questions. The bill is not catching up with the way abuse online is reaching me," she said.

"Those women that are even less privileged than I am who do not speak English well, it's hard to see how this bill will be useful at all."

The Senate has referred the anti-trolling bill to the committee for inquiry, with a report expected by March 24.