The Major Consequences of Australia’s New Social Media Laws
In the wake of the Christchurch shootings and the disturbing video that made the rounds on social media afterward, Australia’s Government expeditiously passed new legislation that puts the onus on tech companies to remove violent material from their platforms or face criminal charges. Violent material extends to terrorist acts, murders, attempted murders, torture, rape or kidnap.
The ‘Sharing of Abhorrent Violent Material’ bill provides Australia’s eSafety commission with unprecedented powers to deem what is suitable for public consumption and what is not. Under the bill, directors of social media companies could face personal liability and up to three years jail time. Fines imposed could be as high as 10 percent of a company’s global revenue. This should come as no surprise to Australians who are accustomed to exorbitant fines for petty offenses such as jaywalking ($60 fine), swearing (up to $500 fine) or not wearing a seatbelt ($298 fine).
Enforcing fines of the magnitude proposed by this bill could prove a little more difficult than slapping Bob with a $60 infringement ticket for crossing the road without the assistance of a flashing green man, or, flashing green person.
Australia’s attorney general, Christian Porter, boasted that “this is most likely a world first” in a television interview moments after the law passed. But here’s the thing about being first in a complex and ambiguous environment; more often than not it means that you’re probably wrong.
As tech luminary and co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, Peter Thiel, says, when it comes to startup companies navigating uncertain environments, it is often the last mover that wins the market in the long-term; “Microsoft was the last operating system, and Google was the last search engine”. That is because last movers can learn from the inevitable mistakes and failures of others trying to navigate unchartered territories. And that is essentially what online censorship is — unchartered territory.
This is precisely why expeditiously introducing this legislation, without consulting industry, or thinking through the second, third and subsequent orders of consequence amount to nothing more than a knee-jerk, emotional reaction — not a rational decision. Not thinking through the subsequent orders of consequence is akin to kids failing the marshmallow test, unable to delay gratification for a mere 15 minutes in order to triple their keep of marshmallows!
History is littered with stories that warn of jumping to emotion-driven conclusions at the expense of reason; whether it was the Athenians marching into battle against Sparta 2,400 years ago, or numerous tech startups today whose founders proclaim that they’re going to “change the world” on Twitter, only to shut down 12 months later due to having spent all their funding on building products nobody asked for.
Of course, almost all of us were deeply disturbed by the Christchurch video and would welcome a world where such horror didn’t occur, to begin with, let alone get recorded and distributed online. Still, my emotions and the collective emotional temperament of Australians across the country shouldn’t be the single determining factor in whether or not to pass this bill.
This bill amounts to an oversimplified solution to a very complex problem. In order to understand something complex one must take a reductionist view; break things down into its component parts, understand those parts, and then put them back together. Unfortunately, it seems Australian politicians did nothing of the sort, by circumventing the usual due diligence they extend to proposed bills. Forget Occam’s razor, complex problems require complex thinking.
Extreme ideologues too are plagued by a simplistic, black and white perception of the social world. Again, Australia’s politicians demonstrated the kind of thinking reserved for young children whose world is categorised into black and white, or that of extreme radicals on either side of the political spectrum.
This is devastating news for companies that host user-generated content. Think social media, blogging, video and podcast platforms, dating apps, gaming platforms, chatrooms, forums and so on.
Co-founder of Australian tech behemoth Atlassian, Scott Farquhar, said of the move that “never has petty party politics so clearly been on display. The ALP agreed it was flawed but supported it anyway (WTF?). We elect officials to do what’s best for the country, but they are point scoring instead. I’m calling on the government to send this legislation to a committee for due diligence and consult properly with industry. In its blind rush to legislate, the government is creating confusion and threatening jobs.”
And jobs being threatened is where those aforementioned subsequent orders of consequence begin.
These consequences begin with jobs and extend to:
As Andrew Bushnell, of the Melbourne-based Institute of Public Affairs, put it, “this is a blatant attack on the freedom of the media to report on matters of public interest and goes well beyond what would be necessary to achieve the stated goal”.
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