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Although Labor’s Digital Duty of Care Bill is being touted as necessary to protect children from the promotion of harm, in reality the Bill would grant the eSafety Commissioner an enormous amount of influence over how all Australians engage with social media content in general.

According to the Bill, it would be the role of the eSafety Commissioner to ensure that Australians enjoy “a safe online environment” by ensuring that social media platforms proactively mitigate, “seriously harmful material,” lest they face penalties of up to $109.2 million.

Free Speech Under Threat

So, what constitutes seriously harmful material?

While some things are reasonable, others are more dubious. For example, “material or conduct that encourages or promotes hostile attitudes towards women or gender equality”.

This is a mechanism which could drastically change the landscape of free online political discourse in Australia, and freedom of speech in general.

Even more concerning than that is the following: “the Minister [for Communications] may, by legislative instrument, determine material or conduct, or a combination of material and conduct, that the Minister is satisfied may cause serious harm.”

In other words, not only is what is considered seriously harmful already opaque, but the Minister for Communications (following advice) would be able to create new categories of harm which could then be policed by the eSafety Commissioner in the same way as the other categories of harm.

The Minister can say “Y is seriously harmful” and social media platforms would have to prevent Australians from seeing Y or face fines in the tens of millions of dollars.

The enormous fines are no doubt designed to ensure that social media companies err on the side of caution and inevitably over-police their obligations just to be safe.

It is imperative that we not fall for Labor’s guilt-trip about safety. This Bill is about controlling the narrative online, and must be defeated.

If we don’t, a chilling precedent will be established for political discourse online, silencing the once free and open space where most Australians engage with such material.

Transcript of YouTube Video

The Labor government’s Digital Duty of Care Bill exposure draft was released yesterday, and it is much worse than we first thought. It is nothing more than another attempt by this government to censor free speech in this country.

The bill purports to place a sweeping legal obligation on providers of social media, search engines, messaging apps, AI tools, and a host of other online services to ensure — in the language used — “a safe online environment.”

But in practice, what this means is that platforms are going to need to take steps to minimise exposure to broadly defined categories of harmful material and conduct, with the minister able to decide what is actually harmful.

It is truly concerning that this sort of incursion into free speech can even be suggested. It creates powerful incentives for over-compliance. Faced with potential civil penalties running into tens of millions of dollars, companies are simply going to err on the side of caution by removing or suppressing borderline but lawful speech, rather than risk enforcement action by our eSafety Commissioner.

The reality is that the online environment — including platforms like X — has finally given Australians the ability to communicate without fear of censorship, and the political establishment, particularly the left, doesn’t like it at all.

This bill will chill free speech and expression for Australians who are increasingly sceptical of institutional narratives on culture and politics. And of course, rather than confront the substance of those arguments, the government is attempting to regulate the architecture of free speech itself — all in the name of safety, all in the name of our children.

What an absolute disgrace.

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Republished with thanks to Senator Alex Antic. Image via Adobe.