Labor has a patchy record when it comes to free speech online.
In 2008, it attempted to filter the internet – an idea that limped on despite enormous practical difficulties until it was ditched in November 2012.
There are no such excesses on display in the eminently sensible proposal to give the Australian Communications and Media Authority (Acma) power to beef up and enforce the social media misinformation and disinformation code.
And yet, the Albanese government finds itself the target of media overreaction to incremental changes and an opportunistic Coalition going on the attack about something it had every intention of implementing if it had been re-elected.
Articles in the Australian newspaper give prominence to claims from social media giants that the Acma plan will chill free speech, and Tony Abbott’s former chief of staff, Peta Credlin, has warned against the creation of a “ministry of truth”.
The Liberal senator Claire Chandler labelled it a threat to democracy in the Spectator, while the shadow home affairs minister, James Paterson, is also concerned and signalling the Coalition won’t play along.
But there are a few problems that get in the way of a good scare campaign here: the reforms are actually quite a small evolution of self-regulation, and as recently as last year the Coalition was absolutely in favour.
In June 2021 Acma asked the Morrison government for information-gathering powers and “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.
In March 2022 the then communications minister, Paul Fletcher, agreed, saying the change would “encourage platforms to be ambitious in addressing the harms of disinformation and misinformation, while providing Acma with the ability to hold platforms to account should their voluntary efforts prove inadequate or untimely”.
The Coalition went to the May 2022 election with a promise to introduce new laws to hold big tech companies to account.
Labor agreed, and when the communications minister, Michelle Rowland, recommitted to the policy in January 2023 the Digital Industry Group Inc (Digi) – whose members include Google, Apple, Meta, Twitter and TikTok – did not complain.
The Digi managing director, Sunita Bose, said the group welcomed the news that Labor aimed to “reinforce Digi’s efforts and that it formalises our long-term working relationship with the Acma in relation to combatting misinformation online”.
Hardly the end of the world, then.
As the communications department and minister have made clear, Acma will not gain the power to request specific content or posts be removed from digital platform services.
While Acma will gain powers to impose a tougher code there is no guarantee it will ever use them – the policy is intended as a stick that will encourage the voluntary code to be improved.
So, not so much an Orwellian central agency judging what truth and falsity is as a body that encourages social media companies to have some way to tell the difference. Even then, the threshold for policies to kick in is only if posts could cause “serious harm”.
And what sort of serious harms are we talking about? Some of the examples given by the department include misinformation “about a group of Australians inciting other persons to commit hate crimes against that group”; “undermining the impartiality of an Australian electoral management body”; or “that caused people to ingest or inject bleach products to treat a viral infection”.
Is it a great loss to free speech to require social media companies to have rules on posts that encourage another Cronulla riot, or January 6 insurrection, or for people to try to cure Covid with bleach?
What’s even more galling about the Coalition about-face is that the Morrison government actually did enact a more direct form of censorship of what can be said on the internet.
The 2021 Online Safety Act gave the eSafety Commissioner the power to force social media companies and other websites to take down material that the commissioner deemed to be bullying, punishable by fines of up to $137,500 for individuals who refuse.
So, a government agency dictating that particular bullying posts come down did not raise alarms about being a Ministry of Truth when enacted by the Coalition; but allowing Acma to impose tougher rules if industry self-regulation fails is Orwellian when done by Labor.
It’s all getting a bit reminiscent of the Gillard government’s proposal to create a public interest media advocate in 2013. The suggestion then was that traditional media’s self-regulation had to meet certain standards for companies to get the benefit of an exemption to the Privacy Act.
In response the Daily Telegraph portrayed the then communications minister Stephen Conroy alongside other “despots” attempting to control the free press, including Stalin, then apologised … to Stalin.
Once again we see the Coalition aiding a form of campaigning journalism – campaigning not so much against the policy, which was acceptable just a year ago, but against the proponent.
