Labor is facing growing opposition from conservative and Christian groups against a plan to toughen social media self-regulation of misinformation, including fresh claims from the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) that the proposal will “cancel Christian posts online”.
The ACL joins Family Voice, One Nation and the former Nationals MP George Christensen in campaigning against the bill. Its new claims come despite the communications minister, Michelle Rowland, releasing an exposure draft and guidance materials that explain Australian Communications and Media Authority will not gain the power to request specific content or posts be removed from digital platform services.
It will campaign against the changes in Rowland’s seat of Greenway at the Victory Life Christian church in Blacktown on Saturday evening.
One Nation will also campaign against the bill at a free speech conference in Brisbane later in August, with conservative broadcaster Alan Jones a keynote speaker.
Christensen, who is now the Australian campaigns director of right-wing petition platform CitizenGo, has amassed more than 20,000 signatures for a petition against the bill.
In June 2021 the Acma asked the Morrison government for “reserve powers” to introduce binding rules and codes of conduct due to concerns the existing rules written by industry were “too narrow” to prevent all the harms of misinformation and disinformation.
The Coalition committed to introduce the laws. After the Coalition was defeated at the 2022 election, Labor recommitted to the policy in January 2023.
The law would allow ACMA to require social media companies to toughen their policies on “content [that] is false, misleading or deceptive, and where the provision of that content on the service is reasonably likely to cause or contribute to serious harm”.
In campaign materials Michelle Pearse, the chief executive of the Australian Christian Lobby, claims the bill is a “threat to our religious freedom”.
“The ‘mis-information bill’ is particularly dangerous for Christians who want to express an alternate view to the prevailing woke culture on gender and sexuality and for those who want to speak out against abortion,” she said.
Wendy Francis, ACL’s national director, told Guardian Australia the bill “fails to include any mechanisms to protect valid expression of opinion and belief or to ensure that there are clear and defined limits on suppression of speech”.
Francis cited challenging the “affirmation only” approach to gender transitioning, comments questioning health advice from the chief medical officer and “public discussion on the inappropriateness of conversion therapy legislation, where it extends unjustifiably to prayer” as examples of speech that could be in the firing line.
Francis warned the bill gives social media platforms “far greater scope” to become vehicles for “political bias”.
Christensen’s CitizenGo campaign to “save free speech” came to Canberra on Friday, with two mobile truck billboards outside Old Parliament House warning that the “government is watching you”, even though the changes preserve industry self-regulation.
Christensen denied the campaign was misleading.
“Well, the government is proposing a law which will have a government agency, basically, doing the enforcement of social media companies to enforce us, in terms of what we post online,” he told Guardian Australia.
“So this is going to be big government instructing big tech what to censor and how to censor them.”
This week the Coalition formalised its opposition to the bill. In March 2022 the then communications minister, Paul Fletcher, said the changes would “encourage platforms to be ambitious in addressing the harms of disinformation and misinformation”.
But shadow communications minister, David Coleman, said the bill was “very bad”, gave Acma “extraordinary powers” and the government should “rip it up”.
“Freedom of speech is fundamental to our democracy, and the Coalition will always fight for it.
“[The bill] would lead to digital companies self-censoring the legitimately held views of Australians to avoid the risk of massive fines.”
Christensen acknowledged the Coalition in government had proposed the same thing, but said he complained at the time.
Rowland said “online misinformation and disinformation sows division, undermines democracy and can cause serious harm”.
“It is a threat to the wellbeing of Australians, and should be taken seriously.”
“The ACMA would have no powers to determine what is true or false. The moderation of content would remain the responsibility of the digital platforms – as is already the case.”
