Misinformation disinformation Bill: Senator Sarah Hanson-Young unleashes on secretive social giants

Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young has unleashed a fiery rant against “secretive and dishonest” social media companies as the government moves to implement controversial laws to regulate the harm caused by misinformation and disinformation on the platforms.

During a senate committee into the legislation on Thursday, Senator Hanson-Young took aim at Digital Industry Group director of policy affairs and research Jennifer Duxbury, who represents social media giants and digital organisations, including X, Meta, TikTok, and Google.

The industry body has opposed provisions in the Bill that would allow the media watchdog, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) powers to get information from platforms.

Senator Hanson-Young said the regulations were needed because platforms had repeatedly “proven themselves to be secretive and dishonest”.

“It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about mis- or disinformation … harms to children (or) scams and advertising,” she said.

“The platforms continue to hide behind their secretive algorithms, their data harvesting systems. There is a complete lack of transparency.

“That’s why your platforms, your members, cannot be trusted to do the right thing. That’s why we need laws in place.”

Dr Duxbury said the information-gathering powers should be “focused on the policy priorities of the Bill,” and were too broad.

Despite this, eSafety commissioner Julie Inman Grant said the Bill’s information-gathering powers were needed.

“We can’t have accountability without meaningful transparency,” she said,

“My experience having worked 22 years in the technology industry, and now almost eight years as (commissioner), we absolutely need powers to compel very specific answers to specific questions around what they are and are not doing.”

Earlier in the hearing, Senator Hanson-Young said it was “absolute rubbish” that social media platforms weren’t “profiting off mis- and disinformation”, especially in situations where content goes viral.

Dr Duxbury said she “respectfully” disagreed with that opinion.

“I have acknowledged that there is more work to do, and I’ve also made the point … that tackling mis- and disinformation online requires a holistic effort from a variety of stakeholders,” she said.

“It can’t just be the sole responsibility of platforms.”

Speaking on the Bill, Dr Duxbury said platforms supported legislation calling on them to “address mis- and disinformation”; however, she said it had to be “balanced with appropriate safeguards against freedom of expression”.

As it stands, the Coalition has strongly opposed the Bill and says it would be an attack on free speech.

ATTACK ON FREE SPEECH

The Bill has also been attacked by religious groups, including the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL), which said it would pose a “serious threat to the Australian democracy”.

“One of our concerns about this Bill is that it has the potential to stifle the processes through which knowledge moves on,” ACL independent researcher Elizabeth Taylor said.

“The misinformation of today may be proven to be correct tomorrow, or new information may come to displace the incumbent orthodoxies of the day. This is the process of progress.”

ACL chief executive Michelle Pearse said the Bills’s provisions that would protect religious vilification were “an over-reaction to censor contrary opinions”.

Melbourne Archbishop Peter A Comensoli also questioned who would be making judgments around what counts as misinformation and disinformation and said there needed to be more transparency.

“The legislation itself does not deal with this in any articulate way … the issue around who would be making judgments around what is truthful, what is fact, not so much the content itself,” he said.

“The platforms themselves have bias.”

Human rights commissioner Lorraine Finlay said the legislation needed “greater transparency, accountability and scrutiny mechanisms” and feared it could create “tiers of speech rights”.

Although Ms Finlay said there needed to be laws to “combat misinformation and disinformation”, the Bill’s broad definitions meant there was a danger in confusing “misinformation and disinformation” with “behavioural content that we don’t like”.

“We don’t feel the Bill in its current form strikes that right balance in terms of the protections that it provides, particularly for freedom of expression,” she said.

She also feared the Bill could lead to people self-censoring and prevent people from posting on digital platforms.

“That’s a harm that we say is very real based on the current drafting of the legislation, but it’s a harm that’s actually very hard to measure because we simply don’t know to what extent that self-censorship might occur,” Ms Finlay said.